Scalæ By the Bay

A lot of startups use Ruby on Rails for fast development, which makes sense -- it’s great for building CRUD apps quickly and cheaply. But building your app with Rails has it’s own drawbacks: it can get huge and messy, runtime is slow, and concurrency is an afterthought. While that shouldn’t stop you from using the framework, it’s important to think about longterm scalability during development. At Brigade, we have been developing a social network for politics using Rails. However, with time and more users, we decided to migrate more complex and modular realtime computations to Finagle micro-services. This talk will discuss the technolgies we selected (Scala, Finagle, Thrift) and how we addressed issues of debuggability, data-access, and integrating in various environments.