Kifi's Innovative Use of Typesafe Reactive Platform for Enhanced Internet Search and Information Sharing
Customer Company Size
Startup
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Typesafe Reactive Platform
- Scala
- Play
- Akka
- Lucene
Tech Stack
- Scala
- Play
- Akka
- MySQL
- Memcached
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
- Innovation Output
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Remote Collaboration
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Kifi is an innovative Silicon Valley startup that is revolutionizing the way people search the Internet and store or share information. The platform allows users to easily keep and tag anything they find online, such as articles, videos, pictures, and emails, and quickly find it on top of their favorite search engine results. Kifi also surfaces relevant results that friends have kept, adding a social layer to the search experience. The platform includes messaging to friends, highlighting, and annotation of information found on pages. Kifi's search infrastructure enables users to tag and organize information like a bookmarking system, making it a critical tool for managing online content.
The Challenge
Kifi CTO and co-founder Eishay Smith faced a significant challenge in building an application capable of performing multiple computationally intensive tasks within a limited time frame. The architecture needed to support high performance at all scales and be flexible enough to scale up and down instantly to meet unpredictable customer usage patterns. Kifi required blazing fast response times throughout the application tiers, robust support for multithreading to maintain performance, and support for rapid continuous deployments. Additionally, the application needed to achieve near-zero downtime and 100% resilience in case of server faults. A strong Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) orientation in the underlying software languages and frameworks was also critical.
The Solution
The Kifi team chose to build their application using the Typesafe stack, leveraging Scala and Play for all web services. The AngularJS website, browser extensions, and mobile clients communicate with the Play API using JSON. Kifi uses Play's native WebSockets capability for low-latency, two-way client communication, enabling real-time messaging and updates. The backend is built with several MySQL databases and a multi-caching layer using Memcached and a custom in-memory cache to improve response times. Kifi's search engine, developed using Lucene components, returns highly personal results, while a custom Graph engine built in Scala generates user recommendations. For distributed work and task scheduling, Kifi uses Typesafe’s Akka, and service coordination is managed with Zookeeper. The Kifi Engineering team actively contributes to the Scala and Play community, fostering a strong ecosystem around these technologies.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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