Scalæ By the Bay

VMs, Containers, Microservices, CQRS, Actors, Futures, Streams, NoSQL, NewSQL, CRDTs. We are awash in more technology today than ever before. How do you choose what to incorporate as you build your startup? What’s critical, and what’s snake oil? Coursera is a platform for education at scale. Although we first started in 2012, we have grown to serve over 20 million learners from every country on the planet. This talk will trace Coursera’s technology evolution from a PHP and Python monolith (bi-lith, if you will) to a modern microservices-based architecture in Scala. Our frontend technology has evolved from JQuery to React, from integrated to independent. Along the way, we grew 4 native apps (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Android), and evolved from DevOps to to No-Ops. We will cover everything from database technology, IO model, build technology, telemetry systems, scaling, and deployment tooling. Come hear about our key successful decisions, our colossal blunders, our mistakes that just happened to work out, and our open sourced projects you can leverage in your own startups!