3 ms·

First lesson - it's taken Goodreads so long and so many users to actually start moving to microservices.

• mi100hael 8y ago
  I'm not really surprised. Goodreads doesn't have nearly the same level of "real-time" interaction that other social networks do. People can only read (and therefore review) so many books, so it's not like there are millions of users constantly posting new content/comments/etc.
• iamsomewalrus 8y ago
  In general, it's not uncommon for startups of the Goodreads vintage to outgrow a simple Rails app and use a more service oriented architecture. We've actually had services for about 5 years now, but we haven't been very vocal about it. As I mentioned in another comment I, personally, wouldn't advocate for new teams or startups to use a service oriented architecture right out the gate. It's too easy to end up with a distributed monolith (circular dependencies between services, services uptimes that are tightly coupled). Engineers also tend to underestimate the build tooling, observability excellence and discipline you need to make it seamless.
• blahville 8y ago
  How long before they move back again?