Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is the technology stack behind Lanyrd?

18th August 2012

My answer to What is the technology stack behind Lanyrd? on Quora

Lanyrd is principally a Django application—we use Django and Python for almost every aspect of the web application itself, as well as the backend for our iPhone application.

We’re running on EC2, RDS and S3, and we recently switched from doing our own load balancing with nginx to using Amazon’s ELB as well (to help support zero-downtime deploys). We serve cached pages to signed out users using varnish (which also helps with our iCal and Atom feeds).

We make extensive use of Solr—not just for search, but also for our suggested events calendar feature and various other index pages around the site. We also use redis and memcached.

Our offline tasks are managed using celery.

We have some experimental features running on MongoDB and ElasticSearch, but we’ve been trying to reduce our dependence on those technologies in order to simplify our stack somewhat.

Our deployments are managed using a combination of puppet and Fabric.

We have a colophon listing the technologies we are using, but it needs to be updated a bit (thanks for the reminder!) http://lanyrd.com/colophon/