In this talk, we will share the fascinating journey of the Zendesk Indexer, a microservice responsible for indexing tens of thousands of records per second from a relational database into ElasticSearch. Originally born from a need to speed up record updates, the Indexer evolved from a series of scripts written in C-Ruby into a full application built in JRuby. Over the years, it incorporated diverse technologies like Riak and S3 and tackled significant challenges, particularly with concurrency, as Zendesk scaled. Now, we are preparing to reintegrate it into the Rails monolith. Attendees will learn valuable lessons about concurrency, safety mechanisms and scaling.
Schedule
I am a software engineer currently based in Barcelona. I have been working primarily with Ruby for more than 15 years. After founding my start-up as a solo engineer, I joined Zendesk in their HQ of San Francisco, one of the main companies using Ruby in the world. Performance optimization has been an obsession for me since I founded my first start-up as a solo engineer in 2012. Currently, I occupy the role of Group Tech Lead and Senior Staff Engineer, where I focus on performance.