EngineeringProductivity/Projects/Conduit/Tech Stack

Our Technologies

The following is a non-exhaustive lists of the technologies the team primarily chooses to use. When developing a new system, especially under tight time constraints, it is a good idea to stick with these technologies.

Programming Languages

Python (3.5+)

Python is our team's primary programming language. It is a versatile language which is both easy to learn and powerful. Much of our team's previously developed software is built with Python.

Python 3 is the preferred version as it is the future of Python development and most libraries are compatible.

Notes:

• Python has good enough performance for most tasks and is adequate until measurements show otherwise.
• There are many existing Python services interacting with Mozilla's various systems, which may serve as examples.

The following is a set of python libraries commonly used by our team (It's best to have a concrete reason when considering an alternative library that is not listed here):

• click
• connexion
• Django
• Flask
• Kombu
• pytest
• requests
• SQLalchemy

Python (2.7.x)

Python 2 is used where version 3 is inappropriate. This includes the following locations:

• Mercurial extensions (mercurial's python 3 support is incomplete 2017-06-16)
• Scripts packaged with the Firefox build environment
• Modifications to existing systems built with Python 2

Javascript

Javascript (ES6) is used by our team for building client side web applications.

Supporting Services

uWSGI

uWSGI is our preferred WSGI server/gateway. (Here's why we chose this.)

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is our preferred database.

Notes:

• Traditional RDBMS' are well understood by our development team
• Our operations team is more experienced with SQL systems vs newer NOSQL databases
• PostgreSQL can fulfill a similar role to NOSQL databases using the built-in JSON data types.
• There are mature libraries and tools for working with PostgreSQL
• Performance characteristics are well understood and adequate

Redis

Redis is the preferred choice for in-memory storage of data. It performs comparably with memcached in traditional caching scenarios but also supports more powerful data types.

Redis is also suitable as a persistent data store when configured correctly. This is at the expense of some performance, but may be used as such where it makes sense.

Amazon SNS/SQS

Amazon's notification and messaging services are the preferred choice when a reliable internal message queue is required.

RabbitMQ (Mozilla's Pulse)

Messages which are relevant to a wider audience may be published to Mozilla's Pulse service. While it is possible to use Pulse for non-sensitive internal messages, Amazon SNS/SQS is preferred.