Building new on top of old: the argument for simplicity
summary
GitHub runs a Ruby on Rails monolith backed by MySQL and serves over 11M users while favoring proven tools over novelty. Deploys happen from chat hundreds of times a day via bots. A rewrite of GitHub Enterprise cuts build time from 40 to 2 minutes (reduced enterprise build time from 40 to 2 minutes), a custom “spokes” design makes storage triple-replicated (spoke system replicating git to 3 nodes), and a tiny C daemon replaces features for performance (Brubeck simple C daemon).
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:37What is GitHub
- 1:12Where do we work
- 3:30Scale
- 9:37Infrastructure
- 12:31Philosophy
- 19:01Simplicity
- 20:36Roles of new technologies
- 25:25Vertically scaled machines
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