Stream and Go: News feeds for 300M users, built on RocksDB and Raft

Do you have GC logs? GC lockups are the most common case. Have you used G1GC + Java8?

Sounds awfully similar to Riak. :)

Was Riak KV ever considered?

"Cassandra is not row level consistent,[21] meaning that inserts and updates into the table that affect the same row that are processed at approximately the same time may affect the non-key columns in inconsistent ways. One update may affect one column while another affects the other, resulting in sets of values within the row that were never specified or intended." This is not true. Cassandra is row level atomic but I guess it also depends on the version you use maybe. Can you talk about which version and provide a test that satisfies your assertion ?

"there are several things that needs to be tuning (like GC) that is not trivial to do". Do you know that Go's GC is way less advanced than Java GC as of today? This is admitted by Google's Go team lead.

I guess these days people can make up whatever they want without providing any valid tests that prove their assertions. It all comes down to is either love & hate of a programming language or someone wants to put some fancy sounding tools in their resume!!

SendGrid engineer here.

IIRC, each of the three founders wrote components in the language that they were most productive in at the time. So there were services in Python, Perl, or PHP depending on who wrote it. Seems like a solid strategy to take the fastest path to MVP when you're still trying to prove there's a market for what you're building.

As the company grew, Python emerged as the most commonly chosen language for new projects.

As you said, the initial appeal of Go was its performance. An occasional side-effect of "fast" is needing less hardware to do the same work, so its efficiency was also attractive.

I think a key moment that got us interested in Go came at an internal hackathon. One of our engineers built a prototype replacement for a core piece of our MTA. It was something like 6x faster than the existing Python version. The ability to produce that in such a short period of time demonstrated that Go was also a surprisingly productive language.

These days, most of our engineering teams choose Go for new backend services -- even those that aren't performance-sensitive. However, we still have a lot of active development in Python (and Ruby).

Disclaimer: I've been at SendGrid about 4 years, so some of this is second-hand. I'll ask the founders if they're up for doing an article on our engineering blog about it.

I only use Python for the same reason I use Java: all the NLP / ML frameworks built by people who don't know Go yet.

What you maybe should have said is (speaking from a sales perspective): the reason there's a 356% jump in price, is because of an incredible value proposition step up of 1,000% in what you're getting!

I think that price gap is a classic, and very large, opening for a competitor. There's a ~$89-$129 style plan missing in there, that is a logical step up from $59. That's obviously just my opinion. I also happen to be a big fan of charging more rather than less, in the service space; that under-charging is a common mistake young companies make. And I still can't make sense of $59 to $269 as a step.

I launched a new business in the last quarter. It has a user feed system that is fairly standard. I've built several feed-like features in the last decade. I looked at Stream a while back, having run across it while trying to avoid building my own again. The good news is, I like your product, it got my attention. That price jump between plans, for a very modest increase in service volume, made it a non-starter. It's too easy and cheap to build my own, which then gives me tight control over its evolution over time as well. It's basically impossible at your price points to compete with what I can just do for myself relatively quickly; that $269 product can be run on a low-cost Digital Ocean droplet in terms of its actual resource demands. You're charging for the quality of your software product primarily, and some support, which makes perfect sense. The problem, is that I can build that and scale it to the $899 plan and save myself $10k a year. If you could do 10 million updates at ~$50-$75 / month, with normal plan stepping from there, it'd be interesting. 250k to 350k updates per day is not an immense sum, just 20,000 daily active users can saturate that pretty easily.