{"id":13020,"date":"2021-04-24T11:36:34","date_gmt":"2021-04-24T15:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vernai.com\/?p=13020"},"modified":"2021-04-24T11:36:34","modified_gmt":"2021-04-24T15:36:34","slug":"howdy-from-the-tech-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/host.tucknologies.com\/~v3rn4dm1n\/2021\/04\/24\/howdy-from-the-tech-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Howdy from the Tech Team!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"While the marketing folks and communications scientists are off doing their respective thing, we thought you might enjoy a brief behind-the-scenes peek at the sorts of things that we’re doing to make VERN awesome to use.<\/p>\n

Specifically, we’re going to talk about VERN integration, brag a bit about speed, and we’ll talk a bit about the system architecture.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fair warning:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0This one is geared more towards folks that are nerds like us, so it might be a little dry if you’re not a nerd like us. That said, we do hope that you’ll still find it interesting and would love to hear any questions<\/a> you might have about the things that we talk about here<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>Integration<\/h2>\n

\"\"When we started out on the project, we wanted to make VERN absolutely as easy to use as possible. While we considered a few ways to make this happen, we decided that the best solution for all sides of the equation would be to present it as a REST API that speaks JSON. This way, the only barriers to entry are the ability to create an account and subsequently make requests over the internet. The entire API is a single endpoint (POST \/analyze<\/code>) for the time being, and there are only two known failure scenarios.<\/p>\n

To make things even easier, we’re definitely going to release client libraries for the various languages out there, but for those who use a language for which we haven’t released a client, integration is still pretty easy. For example, let’s say that we want to analyze the phrase “my sausages turned to gold.” Here’s how we’d make that request with\u00a0curl<\/code>:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

curl -s -X POST \\\n  -H 'Authorization: my-vern-creds' \\\n  -H 'Accept: application\/json' \\\n  -H 'Content-Type: application\/json' \\\n  -d '{\"text\":\"my sausages turned to gold\"}' \\\n  https:\/\/vernapi.com\/analyze\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
In return, you get back a JSON response that contains both the text that was analyzed as well as a collection of confidence scores:<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\n
{\n  \"<\/span>text\"<\/span><\/span> : \"<\/span>my sausages turned to gold\"<\/span><\/span>,\n  \"<\/span>scores\"<\/span><\/span> : [\n    {\"<\/span>name\"<\/span><\/span> : \"<\/span>sadness\"<\/span><\/span>, \"<\/span>value\"<\/span><\/span> : 12.5<\/span>},\n    {\"<\/span>name\"<\/span><\/span> : \"<\/span>anger\"<\/span><\/span>, \"<\/span>value\"<\/span><\/span> : 12.5<\/span>},\n    {\"<\/span>name\"<\/span><\/span> : \"<\/span>humor\"<\/span><\/span>, \"<\/span>value\"<\/span><\/span> : 12.5<\/span>}\n  ]\n}<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
 <\/p>\n
So, it’s a run-of-the-mill REST API, and that means we’re drastically sacrificing performance, right?<\/p>\n
<\/a>Speed<\/h2>\n
Not really. For various reasons, we chose\u00a0Go<\/a>\u00a0as our implementation language for our API. We may do a piecemeal switch to\u00a0Rust<\/a>\u00a0at some point, but for now, Go is the sweet spot for our development style and performance needs.<\/p>\n
In our most recent round of stress testing, we used both\u00a0siege<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0hey<\/a>\u00a0to hit the production environment with a total of 25000\u00a0analyze<\/code>\u00a0requests per run via either 100 or 200 emulated concurrent users (depending on our mood). Here’s what we know after multiple test runs with both tools over the last week:<\/p>\n