From Legacy to Latest: How Zendesk Upgraded a Monolith to Rails 8.0 Overnight
Thomas Countz • Cracow, Poland • Talk

Date: February 28, 2025
Published: March 17, 2025
Announced: January 28, 2025

The Ruby Platform Core Team at Zendesk supports hundreds of Ruby services, internal gems, and a few massive monoliths. In this talk, the team will share how they upgraded one of their biggest monoliths to Rails 8.0 just 14 hours after it was released, covering the tools and processes that made it happen. Topics include dual booting in production, testing daily against Rails' main branch, tracking gem dependencies, and using production profiling to keep performance in check.

Thomas is part of Zendesk's Ruby Platform Core team, focusing on infrastructure support for Ruby and Rails across the organization. In his free time, he enjoys working on hardware projects, playing board games, and hiking in the forest with his husband. His career is guided by three core principles: to create, to learn, and to share.

Ruby Community Conference Winter Edition 2025