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Comment by ktbwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any good counterpoint articles/references that describe how a company has been able to scale while keeping the rails monolith backend?

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Intercom gave a talk at the recent Rails world conference about how they moved to a micro service based architecture, but all it ended up doing was increase operational complexity. They're now in the process of porting their microservices into their monolith.

All the talks are being released in the next week or so, you should take a look when it's out, it was very interesting.

There's ZenDesk. Here's a comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32178105

It references a RailsConf 2022 talk where they chatted about handling a billion requests a day with mostly a Rails monolith. The author of the talk ended up commenting in that thread mentioning it's closer to 2 billion, all of which hit the application (these aren't CDN cache hits).

Shopify is massive. It has grown to a small collection of specialized services but the monolith is still the main backend and the traffic is database heavy and transactional, it’s not just dumb cache reads.

Tens of millions RPMs is the baseline and there’s massive, massive spikes for Black Friday or high profile events

It’s not Facebook/Google/Netflix traffic but it’s up there. Language is very rarely the bottleneck that people think it is

Shopify is probably the most obvious example.

Well, yeah, but "adopt and become the main driving force in both the language and the framework development" is -- while sometimes the least cost way of achieving your goal, especially compared to tossing and rebuilding a complex stack you've built on top of the language and framework -- hardly an endorsement of the inherent suitability of the platform for your use case.

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