Building a Production-Ready Social Networking Backend with Typesafe Reactive Platform
Customer Company Size
Startup
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Typesafe Reactive Platform
- Akka
Tech Stack
- Scala
- Java
- Amazon EC2
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Conspire is a TechStars company that analyzes email data to provide users with detailed analytics about their email network. Founded by Paul McReynolds and Alex Devkar in 2012, the company is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and later set up headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Conspire's platform helps users understand the strength of connections between people, maintaining an up-to-date network of connections without user intervention. The company aims to find the strongest path of connections in a user's extended network when needed.
The Challenge
Conspire faced the challenge of revamping their backend system to support a customer-facing product. Their original backend was a multi-threaded Java application with a traditional concurrency model, which was too complicated and not suitable for future developments. The team needed a new solution that could handle scalability, resiliency, and simplicity, as the existing codebase was not up to the mark.
The Solution
Conspire chose to use Typesafe’s Akka as the basis for their new backend, due to its ability to build highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant event-driven applications. The team initially started with Java, as most members were familiar with it, but eventually moved to Scala, thanks to Ryan Tanner's advocacy. The architecture was designed to decouple the backend from the frontend, allowing for independent service operation and reducing concerns about scalability and resilience. Akka's 'Let it Crash' philosophy was embraced, allowing nodes to fail without affecting the entire system.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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