Build Systems that Drive Business
30–31 Oct 2018: Training
31 Oct–2 Nov 2018: Tutorials & Conference
London, UK

Evolution of the Runtastic backend

Simon Lasselsberger (Runtastic GmbH)
11:20–12:00 Thursday, 1 November 2018
Microservices and Containers
 Location: King's Suite - Sandringham
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 4 ratings)
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Prerequisite knowledge

  • A basic understanding of backend systems and databases

What you'll learn

  • Explore the evolution of the architecture of the eight-year-old Runtastic microservice backend

Description

Simon Lasselsberger shares diagrams that illustrate the evolution of the architecture of the eight-year-old Runtastic microservice backend. You’ll discover how Runtastic gradually moved from two monolithic services with lots of design flaws to a modern microservices architecture using several database technologies and see the pitfalls, mission-critical challenges, and technology and topology decisions faced along the way.

Simon also details the company’s team structure as the deployment changed over the years—particularly how switching from departments to Agile feature teams impacted the design of microservices and caused the company to rethink its deployment strategy completely. In the early days, it rented its servers from a hosting company in Germany; then it bought its own servers and ran them in two different data centers. The company’s newest strategy is to switch from virtual servers to containers running in an on-premises OpenShift cluster.

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Simon Lasselsberger

Runtastic GmbH

Simon Lasselsberger is lead system architect at Runtastic, where he works on the Rails web page and Ruby backend. The company’s fourth full-time employee, Simon helped to scale the technical system and the development teams, was in charge of the backend development team for several years, and was part of the project team to transition the development process from departments to Agile feature teams. He started his professional life in chip design but always loved software a little bit more—not just because software is more agile than hardware development but also because he enjoys being able to tackle bigger problems at higher abstraction levels. That’s why he also fell in love with Ruby when he first tried it out.

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Comments

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Simon Lasselsberger | LEAD SYSTEM ARCHITECT
5/11/2018 13:54 GMT

I just uploaded the slides.

Bart Krijgsman | OPS ENGINEER
4/11/2018 15:11 GMT

Simon, Please would you send over the presentation “Evolution of the Runstatic backend”.
I would like to show this presentation to my colloagues.

Thanks