Competition for developers "HighLoad Battle"

    As part of the Highload ++ conference , which will be held on October 25 and 26 in Moscow, at the InfoSpace conference center, we in Oversan came up with a contest.

    Highload ++ is being held for the fourth time, this is the place where developers and administrators of highly loaded systems meet. We decided to add some practice to it. HighLoad Battle - a competition for the rapid development of a simple, but resistant to the load of the project. We will evaluate projects on a number of both engineering and economic indicators. For the winner, we prepared a good gift - Apple iPad WiFi 64Gb, and for those who won the second and third prizes - a supply of Skalaxi cloud infrastructure resources.


    About the contest

    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 on the specifications 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 limitation is that the API must be fully supported (the search should return articles 3 seconds after they are published, etc.), and all test traffic should be processed by your application, and not “cut off” by the firewall.

    The second part of the competition is load testing: during 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, database sharding and other specific techniques for the week cannot be developed and tested, but we believe that for many the competition will be interesting and useful.

    The competition will be held in several stages:
    • By the end of this week we will register teams and consult with you;
    • At the end of the week, we give you access to the repository on GitHub in such a way that we will see your code, but competing teams will not. This is necessary so that we make sure that you are not cheating. :) The testing technique, of course, is absolutely identical for all teams;
    • On the same day we will issue you an account in Skalaxi with an unlimited number of resources for hosting a competitive project;
    • A few days after this, 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, test it in practice, write scripts for testing yourself (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 of the day according to the results of the competition, we will conduct rewarding of winners and debriefing in the format of a flipchart session next to the stand of our company.


    How will the competition itself be held on the 25th and 26th

    By the 25th, you should have the following:
    • A working project deployed in the Skalaxi cloud, using or not using its capabilities (this already depends on your tactics);
    • Ability to write test scripts for our load testing service, knowledge of the test API.


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

    At the beginning of each of several testing sessions, we will draw each opponent’s team by lot. 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 number 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 Skalaxi API to the maximum, etc., but spend serious amounts of cloud resources on this, or you can make a very compact installation, reducing the cost of points on the hosting infrastructure. On the contrary, you can get a lot of penalty points, but send a huge load to a competitive project. You are free to choose the tactics yourself.

    Useful materials

    So, to register for participation in the competition you need to fill out this form . We will contact you and clarify all questions, and after that we will give out access to the Skalaxi 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 we will be grateful to you for any help and feedback.

    Good luck and see you at HighLoad ++;)

    Also popular now: