Competition for developers "HighLoad Battle"

In the framework of the Highload ++ conference, which will be held on October 25 and October 26 in Moscow, in the InfoSpace conference center, we invented a competition in Oversan.

Highload ++ is being held for the fourth time, this is the place where developers and administrators of high-load systems meet. We decided to add some practice to it. HighLoad Battle is a fast-development contest for an uncomplicated, but load-resistant project. We will evaluate projects for a variety of both engineering and economic indicators. For the winner, we have prepared a good gift - Apple iPad WiFi 64Gb, and for the second and third prize winners - a stock of cloud infrastructure resources of Skalaksi.

About competition

So, the rules of the competition are very simple. You can speak alone, or you can recruit a team of colleagues and like-minded people, the size of the team is not limited. As part of HighLoad Battle, you (your team) will need to develop a blog that works according to the specification we have prepared . You can use your favorite and familiar technology, any database management system, or not use the DBMS at all. It is also allowed to use any caching techniques. The only restriction is that the API should be fully supported (the search should return articles 3 seconds after their publication, etc.), and all test traffic should be processed by your application, and not “cut off” by the firewall.
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The second part of the competition is load testing: in the course of development you will have the opportunity to test your project, and directly at the competition you will be given the opportunity to test the projects of your competitors.

All technical restrictions are described in more detail on the specification page in our Wiki .

Of course, sharding the database and other specific techniques for the week to develop and test will not succeed, but we believe that for many the competition will be interesting and useful.

The competition will be held in several stages:

• Until the end of this week, we register teams and consult with you;
• At the end of the week, we will give you access to the repository on GitHub in such a way that we will see your code, while competing teams will not. It is necessary for us to make sure that you did not cheat. :) The testing methodology, of course, is absolutely identical for all teams;
• On the same day we will issue you an account in Scalaxi with an unlimited number of resources for hosting a competitive project;
• A few days after that, already in the twenties, we will give you access to our load testing system. More on this in our next article, wait a few days;
• Before the conference, you will have time to sharpen the project under the loads created by the test bench, try it out in business, write your own scripts for testing (yes, we have a programmable test service);
• On the 25th and 26th, several testing sessions will be held on HighLoad ++. They are described in more detail below;
• On the 26th, according to the results of the competition, we will award the winners and analyze flights in the format of a flipchart session next to the stand of our company.

How will the competition itself take place on the 25th and 26th

By the 25th, you should have the following:

• A working project deployed in the Scalaxie cloud, using or not using its capabilities (it already depends on your tactics);
• The ability to write test scripts for our service load testing, knowledge of the test API.

You will be able to directly influence the course of the competition, it will not just measure the performance of your project, and here's why:

At the beginning of each of several testing sessions, we determine by the drawing of lots to each opposing team. During the entire session, the time of which is limited, mutual testing will take place. You will test someone else's project, and the team of this project will test your development.

The rating calculation formula takes into account a number of parameters: the number of errors returned by the engine (HTTP 50 *, 40 *), the amount of cloud resources spent, the amount of resources spent on testing.

Of course, we will consider points only for those resources that were spent directly on the testing session. Hosting during the development and testing of a project outside of testing sessions is free for you.

Tactics

You can choose the tactics that you like. You can create a serious system with a separate server for the database, caching, using the Scalaxi API to the maximum, and so on, but spend considerable amounts of cloud resources on it, or you can make a very compact installation by reducing the points costs for the hosting infrastructure. You can on the contrary get a lot of penalty points, but send a huge burden on a competitive project. You are free to choose tactics yourself.

Useful materials

So, to register for the contest you need to fill out this form . We will contact you and clarify all the questions, and after that we will issue access to the Scalaxi cloud and the repository on github.

If you plan to use our API , it is useful to immediately read about it in our wiki. We are actively developing libraries for it and will be grateful for any help and feedback.

Good luck and see you at HighLoad ++;)