2,000 Engineers, 2 Million Lines of Code: The History of a Rails Monolith
Cristian Planas and Anatoly Mikhaylov • September 13, 2024 • Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina • Talk

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