From Ruby on Rails to Java: The Gory Details

Twitter is the largest Ruby on Rails installation on the web right now—however, we have been moving from solely hosting Rails applications to a mixed Rails and JVM deployment. This migration has been ongoing for a few years at Twitter and we now run several back-end, high-throughput, and critical components on the JVM. We’ll discuss our criteria for bringing up services in the JVM, touch upon some of the systems we have migrated, and focus on the challenges presented by this work. Along the way, we’ve taken advantage of new opportunities, and have learned new architectural styles. Twitter is committed to speed of execution, quality, and efficiency—and our mixed deployment allows us all three.