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The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

eng.uber.com

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Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#31

Post by dkarapetyan »

Animats wrote: post #29
dkarapetyan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all bloat. Pure and simple. At the end of the day Uber just does routing and basic allocation. It's a simple operations problem that has been solved since the 70s and no one back then needed ELK, Docker, Cassandra, etc. I've seen this bloat everywhere. It is usually a result of internal politics and posturing by management types. The kinds of people Steve Jobs would have called B and C players. Now the actual…

I have to admit, I could see this running for a city the size of SF on a desktop machine under the table at the taxi depot. Uber has 11,000 drivers in SF, but probably only a few thousand are on at any one time. A ride takes a few minutes, so if you figure 3,000 active drivers and 4 rides per hour, that's only about 3 ride transactions per second. You have a transaction at ordering, one at ride start, and one at ride…

Indeed. Most SaaS operations are over-provisioned both in terms of hardware and software.

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#32

Post by jlarocco »

e1g wrote: post #21

I'd love to know how many people are responsible for devops/operations/app at various stages of any company's journey. Wikipedia says Uber employs 6,500 people so if even 15% of that is on the tech side of the business that's still 1,000+ people allocated to tech. I think this metric would be a useful reality check for a "modern" SaaS project with 3-10 people that's trying to emulate a backend structure similar to th…

I don't know the numbers, but at least some of Uber's tech employees are working on things that aren't directly connected to the app and rides, like mapping and self-driving cars.

One of their recruiters contacted me a while back, and it sounds like they're working on some really neat stuff, but I don't agree with all their business practices, so I didn't pursue it :-/ In any case, he pointed to their website: https://www.uberatc.com/

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#33

Post by NotQuantum »

Uber is really strapped for engineering talent. Especially when it comes for SRE. Myself and many friends working SRE at various Bay Area companies get consistently hit up for free lunches and interviews. It's really weird considering that their stack doesn't NEED to be this complex....

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#34

Post by mkagenius »

Animats wrote: post #29
dkarapetyan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all bloat. Pure and simple. At the end of the day Uber just does routing and basic allocation. It's a simple operations problem that has been solved since the 70s and no one back then needed ELK, Docker, Cassandra, etc. I've seen this bloat everywhere. It is usually a result of internal politics and posturing by management types. The kinds of people Steve Jobs would have called B and C players. Now the actual…

I have to admit, I could see this running for a city the size of SF on a desktop machine under the table at the taxi depot. Uber has 11,000 drivers in SF, but probably only a few thousand are on at any one time. A ride takes a few minutes, so if you figure 3,000 active drivers and 4 rides per hour, that's only about 3 ride transactions per second. You have a transaction at ordering, one at ride start, and one at ride…

> tracking of where all the active drivers are, pinging maybe once a minute.

Once every 5 seconds will be more accurate.

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#35

Post by sandGorgon »

What I'm really wondering about is their app. The UI of the app can be impacted without an app update. For example the UI during the pride parade. Or minute of silence ( http://gizmodo.com/uber-makes-riders-take-a-moment-of-silenc... )

I wonder what's the architecture of the app and the API for this.

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#36

Post by kccqzy »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #23
e1g wrote: post #21

I'd love to know how many people are responsible for devops/operations/app at various stages of any company's journey. Wikipedia says Uber employs 6,500 people so if even 15% of that is on the tech side of the business that's still 1,000+ people allocated to tech. I think this metric would be a useful reality check for a "modern" SaaS project with 3-10 people that's trying to emulate a backend structure similar to th…

That's all bloat. Pure and simple. At the end of the day Uber just does routing and basic allocation. It's a simple operations problem that has been solved since the 70s and no one back then needed ELK, Docker, Cassandra, etc. I've seen this bloat everywhere. It is usually a result of internal politics and posturing by management types. The kinds of people Steve Jobs would have called B and C players. Now the actual…

You certainly have an interesting argument but it doesn't sound convincing. Can you explain more about how 1970s technology can solve the problems Uber is facing in 2016?

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#37

Post by messutied »

Animats wrote: post #25

It's interesting that they don't break the problem apart geographically. It's inherent in Uber that you're local. But their infrastructure isn't organized that way. Facebook originally tried to do that, then discovered that, as they grew, friends weren't local. Uber doesn't need to have one giant worldwide system. Most of their load is presumably positional updates. Uber wants both customers and drivers to keep their…

q

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#38

Post by zer0gravity »

Animats wrote: post #25

It's interesting that they don't break the problem apart geographically. It's inherent in Uber that you're local. But their infrastructure isn't organized that way. Facebook originally tried to do that, then discovered that, as they grew, friends weren't local. Uber doesn't need to have one giant worldwide system. Most of their load is presumably positional updates. Uber wants both customers and drivers to keep their…

You know that saying : "I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one".

With this kind of technology stack you end up when you try to move fast. I'm sure that if more time and thought would have been put into it, it would have been more elegant and simple. But has time these days ?

Re: The Uber Engineering Tech Stack, Part I: The Foundation

#39

Post by icebraining »

stickfigure wrote: post #7

I've been sitting on the sidelines of the "Uber is great!" vs "Uber are a bunch of dicks!" war for quite some time now. I always figure every company of reasonable size contains elements of both. But geezus... this was posted with the title in all caps "THE UBER ENGINEERING TECH STACK, PART I: THE FOUNDATION". Presumably by someone at Uber. Is their corporate culture that arrogant?

Presumably by someone at Uber

Why would you assume that? Especially since the blog post is already a few days old, and the submitter doesn't have any other Uber-related posts.

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