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Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

slack.engineering

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Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#141

Post by syspec »

muglug wrote: post #105
alberth wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Matt Thanks for Psalm! Curious, if Slack was built today from ground up - what tech stack do you think should/would be used?

That’s a simple question that’s hard to answer. A slightly different question that’s a bit easier to answer: “if I could wave a magic wand and X million lines of code were instantly rewritten and all developers were instantly trained on that language”. There the choice would be limited to languages that have similar or faster perf characteristics to Hack, without sacrificing developer productivity. Rust is out of the…

Thank you for being brave enough not to suggest Rust.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#142

Post by fulladder »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #127

The thing I don't understand about Slack is how the core functionality seems to have continuously degraded since I started using it in ~2015. When I started using it, its core message sending features basically didn't have the issues with delayed messages or failure to send that I had experienced with competitors. Now, I routinely have to reset the app/clear the cache and go through various dances to get files to upl…

I haven't used Slack in a long time, but isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products? The founders got a nice exit several years back, I doubt they stuck around at Salesforce for long, so it's natural that the product would deteriorate over time.

Slack IRC bridging in the 2014/2015 era was great. We had a lot of people who spent their whole workday in a terminal window and weren't interested in running a web browser in the background continuously just for a chat room.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#143

Post by [deleted] »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #127

The thing I don't understand about Slack is how the core functionality seems to have continuously degraded since I started using it in ~2015. When I started using it, its core message sending features basically didn't have the issues with delayed messages or failure to send that I had experienced with competitors. Now, I routinely have to reset the app/clear the cache and go through various dances to get files to upl…

[deleted]

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#144

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #134
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #127

The thing I don't understand about Slack is how the core functionality seems to have continuously degraded since I started using it in ~2015. When I started using it, its core message sending features basically didn't have the issues with delayed messages or failure to send that I had experienced with competitors. Now, I routinely have to reset the app/clear the cache and go through various dances to get files to upl…

Not to “works on my machine” you, but I…genuinely do not have these problems. I’ve never heard it from my team either. So we could at the very least say it’s not a widespread global issue. Even the percentage of nerds that would want IRC or XMPP bridges back would have to be vanishingly small. I’d be annoyed if Slack reimplemented such functionality because it no doubt slows down future development. Slack has a numbe…

So, it's workspace and user/device specific: two of the workspaces I interact with regularly have these problems and the problems also show up intermittently for some users and not others. (Anecdotally, my experience is that Matrix/Element used to be annoying compared to the Slack experience and now I mostly prefer it to Slack)

I would be fine with the understanding that the IRC bridge was missing functionality (and it always was). Although threads might make it impossible to implement in a nice way now.

As far as new features go, I don't want any new features in Slack: it worked exactly like I wanted it to seven years ago and the new stuff is nice, but not worth the degradation in user experience.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#145

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

fulladder wrote: post #142
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #127

The thing I don't understand about Slack is how the core functionality seems to have continuously degraded since I started using it in ~2015. When I started using it, its core message sending features basically didn't have the issues with delayed messages or failure to send that I had experienced with competitors. Now, I routinely have to reset the app/clear the cache and go through various dances to get files to upl…

I haven't used Slack in a long time, but isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products? The founders got a nice exit several years back, I doubt they stuck around at Salesforce for long, so it's natural that the product would deteriorate over time. Slack IRC bridging in the 2014/2015 era was great. We had a lot of people who spent their whole workday in a terminal window and…

> Isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products?

Yeah, although one can dream that some SaaS company would do htings differently

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#147

Post by quickthrower2 »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #29
heywhatupboys wrote: post #10

Is Slack dead? unironically. Does it have a future? With Teams, etc. coming out, it seems most companies do not want to go the Slack route

My employer buys no Microsoft SaaS service, since we're mostly on Google services, so a stand-alone like Slack works quite well. And nobody uses Google Chat. And besides that, the UX of Teams is miles behind Slack.

Slack is not good UX in my opinion. It is often hard to see what generated a message notification - so yeah someone called me out, but who? where?. It shows me latest thread as being from last month when I know there have been more recent ones. It doesn't collapse those threads, so 100 reply incident threads dominate that view. Slack doesn't scale well (UX-wise) above say 30 people.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#148

Post by jldugger »

radicality wrote: post #45
ThePhysicist wrote: post #41

So they run everything in AWS USE1? That doesn't seem very redundant, but then I guess if the whole of USE1 goes down Slack won't be the only service that will be affected.

Isn’t the point of the article that they don’t? And it describes how they implemented region drains to traffic shift between the different regions. edit: Hmm or maybe not? I still sometimes confuse aws terminology. Perhaps it is all in us-east—1, just in different availability zones (buildings?)

>edit: Hmm or maybe not? I still sometimes confuse aws terminology. Perhaps it is all in us-east—1, just in different availability zones (buildings?)

Correct, us-east-1 has several AZs, names like us-east-1a, us-east-1b etc. IIRC us-east-1 has six of them now.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#149

Post by ec109685 »

kccqzy wrote: post #110
athoscouto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though each cluster was single AZ the whole system wasn't, so we weren't bound by the capacity of a single AZ. Most of the situations where we needed to drastically scale up were known ahead of time as well (e.g. campaign from customer), and we would preallocate instances or even more clusters. I may be forcing my memory, but if I'm not mistaken, our auto scaling was setup in a way that the system could handle s…

That's another way of saying your typical utilization ratio is 66%. Which is on the low side honestly. That said, it's a trade off between efficiency and load spike tolerance. I trust that the trade off is made with informed decision.

66% isn’t low utilization. You’re always going to have micro spikes, and you never want to clip, so keeping some headroom around feels smart.

Unless you co-mingle online and offline (batch) traffic on same hosts, flat response times and high utilization aren’t compatible.

Re: Slack’s migration to a cellular architecture

#150

Post by conradfr »

davedx wrote: post #132
muglug wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a simple question that’s hard to answer. A slightly different question that’s a bit easier to answer: “if I could wave a magic wand and X million lines of code were instantly rewritten and all developers were instantly trained on that language”. There the choice would be limited to languages that have similar or faster perf characteristics to Hack, without sacrificing developer productivity. Rust is out of the…

Not erlang?

But Discord uses Rust to improve performance bottlenecks in OTP ;)
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