The history of a Rails monolith
summary
A Rails monolith at Zendesk grows to 2 million lines of code with roughly 2,000 engineers and scales by extracting services, adding Kafka events, and moving infrastructure to migrated to AWS. The upgrade path is concrete: moving Rails versions forces two years plus of work, removes metaprogramming, and fixes sharding; test infrastructure is heavy—55,000 tests that runs twice per PR to catch regressions.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Rails monolith journey
- 4:49Engineers as knowledge holders
- 5:09Rails monolith evolution at Zendesk
- 8:40Monolith to services at Zendesk
- 10:23JavaScript wars and frontend evolution
- 12:07AWS migration challenges
- 12:48Adopting new tech in large companies
- 15:56Domain fusion after acquisitions
- 17:00Unpredictable large systems
- 19:50Database performance challenges
- 22:24Testing versus types in Ruby
- 23:27Zendesk’s test suite and MiniTest
- 26:26Code ownership and reliability
- 27:30Rails upgrades and metaprogramming
- 31:44Rails upgrade lessons
- 33:10Scaling engineering organizations
- 36:01Q&A
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