Journey to the Center of Microservices

We're trying something new. Well, trying two new things.

We're starting to blog about Wattpad's journey into the world of microservices. And we're blogging on our own platform.

We're proud of the really hard problems we have to solve every day and we'd love to show the solutions to the world. We also know that being candid and talking about our experiences (good and bad) in the public will benefit other engineering teams as well as ours. None of us is a blogger so it's difficult. But we're accustomed to overcoming difficult problems.

The theme here will be our unique personal experiences along the way, ones you haven't heard elsewhere. Don't expect posts that debate monoliths vs. microservices or how to use Docker to do continuous deployment. Those are dead horses. We're frightened of dead horses so we don't want to go near them, let alone beat them. We'll be talking about our failures just as much as our successes. We're forging new paths in scaling a platform that allows millions of people to read and write. That means we have unique problems and we can't wait to talk about them.

Our load balancers receive over 2 billion requests per day. Our traffic is constantly growing. We have a large monolithic PHP codebase. We decided about a year ago to start chipping away at that monolith to turn it into microservices. We have two microservices under our belts now so we'll recount what it took to create them and what the hard parts were and going forward we'll post current projects, as we're working on them. We just started working on perhaps our most important microservice, the Text Service. This service will be responsible for all storage and retrieval of text. Pretty key for a reading and writing platform.

Oh yeah, we're not just creating microservices, we're writing them in Go and loving it so expect to hear all about that too.