Twitter (X)
Twitter started on Ruby on Rails during its "fail whale" era, then moved much of its backend onto the JVM using Scala as it grew, while also creating tools like Bootstrap and Finagle along the way.
What we cover in the quiz
- As Twitter grew past what its original Rails stack could comfortably handle, the company rebuilt core services on the JVM, with Scala as the primary language, for better performance and reliability.
- Bootstrap started as an internal tool at Twitter to help engineers build consistent interfaces without needing deep design expertise, and was open-sourced in 2011, quickly becoming one of the most popular frontend frameworks in the world.
- Finagle is a library Twitter built for writing robust, asynchronous remote procedure call clients and servers on the JVM, handling concerns like retries, load balancing and failure recovery between internal services.
- Twitter built Manhattan as its own multi-tenant distributed database after finding that existing options did not fit its combination of scale, latency requirements and operational needs.
- Mesos abstracts a cluster of machines into a shared pool of resources that different applications can request from, which let Twitter run many different services on shared infrastructure rather than dedicating separate hardware to each one.