Often, in the life of a successful software project comes a time when the previously elegant architecture turns into a horrific monolith that no one wants to touch. But, how do you pull out its features into new services without incurring downtime, while simultaneously migrating the data to a better schema? The messages feature on soundcloud.com shows one way of doing this. This feature got pulled out of a Rails application and became a Scala microservice with a dedicated database. This talk outlines the steps of the migration, drawbacks of large Rails applications, and the pains of adopting Scala.
Jan Kischkel is a senior web developer for SoundCloud in Berlin. After receiving a diploma from the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, he has worked on a wide range of projects, from huge enterprise applications to microservices.
