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Leveraging Open Source Software to

Maximize Your Development Resources(and the problems you can expect with success)

LOGIN 2010, Seattle, WA

March 13, 2010

Brett G. Durrett (@bdurrett)

Vice President Engineering & Operations, IMVU, Inc.

1

Who is This Guy?

• VP Engineering & Operations, IMVU

– 5 years, plan on many more

• VP Operations / GM Consumer, There.com

– 5 years

• CEO, Asylum Entertainment

– Independent game studio

– 7 years, 20+ titles

2

Why Am I Here?

• Talking about Open Source Software

– How it was critical to IMVU’s success

– Problems that resulted

– Why it is probably important to you

• More about business than technology

An online community where members use 3D avatars

to meet new people, chat, create

and have fun with their friends

4

How We Work

• Agile

– 2-3 week sprints

• Continuous Deployment

– No QA or staging servers

– Every commit goes live to production, 20 min

– New code goes live 20-50 times each day

• Data Driven

– Make decisions using customer metrics

5

IMVU is Built on Open Source

Python

PHPBB

OSCommerce

Apache Server

Linux

Memcached

MogileFS

Perlbal

PHP

MySQL

Nagios

Cacti

Coppermine

Buildbot

XULRunner

YUI

jQuery

B2evolution

Audiere

Boost

Ogg Vorbis

Phorum

Cfengine

FAI

Solr

Subversion

Eclipse

6

What Scale are We Talking About?

• Over 4 million user-generated items

• 2 million monthly active users

• 10 million monthly unique visitors

• 50 million registered users

• Peak ~120K concurrent IM client logins

• It’s a real business!

– $40 million run rate

– Profitable and doubled revenue in 2009

7

Don’t Sue Me

I’m not a lawyer – I don’t play one on TV

I am not offering legal advice

Before using Open Source software, read

the license, consult an attorney if needed

8

Is Open Source the right solution for you?

9

What business problem are you trying to solve?

10

Why Open Source?

• Problem is finding right product, not scale

– A product that supports your business

• Limited resources

• Wheels have already been invented

11

Why IMVU Chose OSS

• 2004 – are avatars and virtual goods even

a business?

• Wanted to spend limited resources only on

problems somebody else hadn’t solved

• Quickest path to customer feedback

12

IMVU Launch, 2004

• Small team

– 2 engineers, 3 content / design

• Resources spent on unique problem

– 3D IM Client

– Derivable 3D UGC

• Open Source for everything else

– LAMP stack

– Catalog (and payments)

– Forums

13

OSS Early Value

• Conception to ship in 6 months

• > 80% code was free

• Real customer feedback

– Quickly learning what had to change

14

And we continued…

• Photo galleries

– Coppermine added in weeks

• Blogs

– B2evo added in one day

• Groups

– Phorum added in about a week

15

OSS Opportunities

• Back end (server side)

• Website

– Libraries

– Applications

• Application libraries

Quick mention:

• Development Tools

• Office Productivity

16

Who Is Making This Stuff

Majority of Open Source projects

designed, created and maintained by

technical people

• Good news for systems & infrastructure

• Not so much for UI for non-technical users

17

Back End (server side)

• Software in mature state

• Works “out of the box”

• Scalable solutions for several problems

– Database, caching, storage, monitoring

• Active contributors from large companies

– Facebook and Google are working for you

18

MogileFS

Business problems

• Lots of UGC

• Little cash

• Despise being hostage to vendor upgrade

MogileFS

• Distributed, redundant data store

• Using 32 Tb, 600 million files

19

Website Libraries

• Popular packages are well supported

– YUI

– jQuery

• Already built many common components

– Dialogs, menus, images, pagination

– Fancy AJAX / DHTML

• Can handle browser idiosyncrasies

20

Website Applications – the Bad

• Software varies in maturity & quality

• Usually requires integration work

– UI consistency

– Interfaces with existing data structures

• It probably won’t scale without investment

21

Website Applications - the Good

• Early solution for non-core problems

– Customer service

– Profiles

– Account basics

• Great for testing feature interest

22

Testing Feature Interest

Do our customers care about blogs?

• B2evo integrated & deployed in 1 day

• Real customer feedback (usage metrics)

23

Application Libraries

• Available for big components

– Rendering

– Audio

– Effects

• Double check the license!

24

XULRunner

• 2008 updated IM client

• Wanted to rapidly iterate on UI

• Used Mozilla HTML libraries

• HTML / Javascript programmers for UI

– Was previously C++ programmer

25

Client UI – Old School

26

Client UI – New Hotness

27

Client UI – Catalog

HTML/JS

30

Development Tools

• Lot’s of great tools

– Ranging from editors to testing frameworks

– Built by engineers for engineers

• Extendable

– You have the source!

31

Office Productivity

• Great options when cash critical

– Free alternatives for Office, Photoshop, etc.

• Sometimes obscure compatibility issues

with commercial versions

• Frequently suffers from unintuitive UI

see http://www.osalt.com/

32

Congratulations!

You spent your resources wisely

You built a product customers love

You’re growing a business

Now you have some problems to solve

33

Scalability

• Back-end systems will probably scale

– Easy to scale by following examples

– Some exceptions for trending and alerting

• Web applications will likely require

investment to scale

34

Scaling Web Applications

• Most packages think of users in the hundreds or

thousands

– “SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE 1”

• Usually no shared (network) caching

– Beneficial for scaling by adding servers

• Nobody has horizontal database partitioning

– Eliminates database as scaling limiter

35

Web App Scaling Cheat Sheet

Database is almost always your problem

1. Add read slaves to database

2. Use shared (network) caching of queries

3. Vertical partition

4. Horizontal partitions

…and SSDs will buy you a lot of time!!!

36

Reality Check

In most cases you probably should not have

been solving those problems anyway

(yet)

37

Feature Testing

• Hypothesis test big wins

– highly valuable

– completely worthless

• Additional difficulties when not definitive

– Kill it or invest in improvements?

• Won’t catch right feature, wrong implementation

• Can lead to orphaned features

38

Blogs

• Customers liked them… kinda

• Largest user base within a few days

– Forced investment to scale the software

– (still less than if we had written them)

39

Security

• The world has access to your source code

• Popular back-end systems pretty good

• Web applications less solid

– Cross-site scripting

– SQL injection

– Admin scripts

– Beware PHP “helpers”

40

Free Upgrades FTW!

Active Open Source projects receive

ongoing improvements

New features and security updates for free!

41

No Soup for You

…but you might not benefit from them

• As your source changes hard to integrate

updates (unless they are libraries)

– Keeping your changes compatible with OS

package requires more investment

• Some benefit from diffs / patches

42

Other Challenges

• Code maintainability

– Unlikely matches your coding standards

– May not have test coverage

• New hires learn by example

– Early integrations may not be best example

43

In conclusion…

Open Source Can Work For You!

• Invest to solve your truly unique problems

• Let others solve your common problems

• Yes, this can lead to future problems

– Many are good, they mean you’re successful

– Better than solving problems you won’t have

44

Q&A

Questions?

45

Thank You!

Brett G. Durrett

bdurrett@imvu.com

Twitter: @bdurrett

IMVU was recognized as one of

the “Best Places to Work” (and we’re hiring)

http://www.imvu.com/jobs/