2,000 Engineers, 2 Million Lines of Code: The History of a Rails

2,000 Engineers, 2 Million Lines of Code: The History of a Rails Monolith

The presentation titled "2,000 Engineers, 2 Million Lines of Code: The History of a Rails Monolith" discusses the evolution of a Rails-based application over 15 years at Zendesk, handled by Senior Staff Engineers Cristian Planas and Anatoly Mikhaylov. The key themes of the talk include the transition from a distributed monolith to a microservices architecture, challenges of upgrading a Rails application, managing infrastructure costs, optimizing resource usage, and maintaining a resilient development environment.

Key Points Discussed:
- Rails as Central Framework: Zendesk's main product has been a Rails monolith since its inception, showcasing the framework's viability at scale.
- Development Evolution: The history of the Rails ecosystem over 17 years includes the return of monolithic architectures as a viable approach amidst the microservices trend.
- Scaling Challenges: Insights were provided on scaling the codebase from 0 to hundreds of millions of users while maintaining reliability and performance.
- Database Challenges: Recognizing the database's role as a bottleneck rather than Ruby itself was crucial; it was noted that the performance of queries significantly affects the system's responsiveness.
- Testing and Reliability: The importance of extensive testing (with over 55,000 tests) to ensure reliable releases was emphasized, including their deployment pipeline which includes multiple stages and checks to maintain system integrity.
- Continuous Upgrading: The process of upgrading from Rails 1.0 to 7.0 included significant challenges, particularly with maintaining code compatibility while avoiding regression.
- Ownership and Collaboration: Managing a large codebase with numerous contributors requires clear ownership and accountability to prevent chaos in development.

The speakers conclude that understanding the history of the Rails framework and the challenges faced by the organization can help guide future improvements, drawing parallels with lessons from literary narratives and the importance of adaptability over rigid adherence to outdated practices. They stress maintaining an open attitude to evolution in technology and processes. This talk serves as both a reflection on Zendesk's journey and as guidance for developers and engineers facing similar scaling issues in their applications.

2,000 Engineers, 2 Million Lines of Code: The History of a Rails Monolith
Cristian Planas and Anatoly Mikhaylov • Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina • Talk

Date: September 13, 2024
Published: January 13, 2025
Announced: unknown

Rails is the best framework for building your startup. But what happens when the startup becomes a leading business? How do you grow and maintain a Rails application for 15 years? In this talk, we will through the life of a Rails-centered org, from 0 to planetary scale.

How do companies grow while keeping Rails at the heart of its stack? How do you maintain a growing application for 15 years in a constantly changing environment?

In this talk, Anatoly Mikhaylov and Cristian Planas, Senior Staff Engineers at Zendesk, will share with you their 10 years of experience in a company that has succeeded with Rails in its core. They will guide you through the life of a Rails-centered organization, that scaled from zero to hundreds of millions of users.

The talk will deal with:

* From the distributed monolith to microservices “lite”: 15 years of an evolving architecture
* Upgrading a Rails application: from 1.0 to 7.0
* Infrastructure: Self-hosted vs Cloud
* Managing growing costs: from product design to resource optimization
* Choosing the right storage for the task: database-driven development
* Collaborating with thousands of engineers around the world: creating a resilient development environment and release pipelines.
* Keeping the lights on: our take on reliability and monitoring

EuRuKo 2024