Brandon Nicoll

Building the Fonts.com Browse Filters Using Redis

Recently on fonts.com, we released a new way to browse and discover fonts. We wanted this tool to be easy to use and return results quickly. In order to accomplish the latter, I made heavy use of Redis data structures and built-in commands. You can find the finished product at fonts.com/browse. The book Redis in Action by Dr. Josiah Carlson helped out immensely while building this feature. Specifically, Chapter 7 - Search-Based Applications. Read more →

High Availability Web Server Caching with Redis

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of re-architecting the fonts.com web server caching strategy. The design isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it was still fun to build and worth sharing. Architecture Diagram Figure 1.) My arrow game is on point Breakdown There are a few ideas at play here: The front-end web servers will attempt to serve data from their local read replica Sentinel instances will be running on each web server An additional failover replica is standing by in case the master goes down A stand-alone, tiebreaker Sentinel instance can achieve quorum with the web servers Local Reads Fonts. Read more →