How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
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How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
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Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#2Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#3Does anyone have any good counterpoint articles/references that describe how a company has been able to scale while keeping the rails monolith backend?
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#4Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.
It seems that the Ruby on Rails monolith lasted through 10 years of explosive growth at airbnb. Thats a pretty scalable to me.
FTA it sounds that it wasnt he language of framework that was an issue, but rather the monolith model.
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#5Does anyone have any good counterpoint articles/references that describe how a company has been able to scale while keeping the rails monolith backend?
Shopify is probably the most obvious example.
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#6Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.
Twitter had to move away from Rails because their high-volume read/write pattern of unrelated data doesn't scale on rdbms and that made ActiveRecord a poor fit for tweets.
They famously and stupidly blamed Ruby and everyone ate their blogpost up because this industry is full of cargo cult behavior patterns. Everyone acts like lemmings and just assumes BigCo knows better than they do.
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#7> In 2018, Airbnb began its migration to a service-oriented architecture, as the Ruby on Rails “monorail” started becoming hard to maintain and was a single point of failure.
A monolithic codebase doesn't have to be deployed as a single artifact to be a single point of failure.
There's nothing stopping you from deploying a monolith application across a distributed number of machines in a highly available manner, including making machines favour some types of work (e.g. web workers and background job workers). Nor is there anything stopping you from performing blue-green deployments or A/B testing if you want to interpret single point of failure as a bug is deployed to all machines simultaneously and affects your entire application.
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#8Why did you change the title to include "Rails"?
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#9Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.
It seems that the Ruby on Rails monolith lasted through 10 years of explosive growth at airbnb. Thats a pretty scalable to me. FTA it sounds that it wasnt he language of framework that was an issue, but rather the monolith model.
Well, you have to put the human cost investment into the picture. When the cost to develop/maintain becomes significantly high, it’s a natural choice to deprecate it and move on to something faster.
Re: How Airbnb Scaled by Moving Away from a Rails Monolith
#10Twitter also had to move away from Ruby into a service-oriented architecture back in the late 00s. It's not a very scalable language, even when you hire people who work on the compiler.
It scaled for a long time for Twitter. With few exceptions, we're not going to work at anything close to the scale of Twitter at the time, so that's plenty scalable for most use cases. Now, if you want to be more compute-efficient that's a different question...