

Building Products at SoundCloud – Part I: Dealing with the Monolith - ABS
http://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-products-at-soundcloud-part-1-dealing-with-the-monolith

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jbwyme
Loose coupling is awesome and dogfooding your public API is smart as well.
However, it seems like there is a lack of strong technical leadership and a
lot of big decisions are being made without thinking them through. For
instance, "We were constrained by the same rules we enforced on third-party
applications... It was not possible, for example, for a microservice to notify
users about activity on private tracks". This type of constraint should be
immediately obvious to the person/people making large architectural decisions.
Throughout the article there are a few examples of "we tried this but shortly
found out it wouldn't work". I may be wrong though and this whole post was
actually the result of an hour meeting to discuss new architecture but phrased
to sound like you actually tried all of those approaches.

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rock_hard
I agree with you. Looks like poor engineering leadership.

Guess its one of the disadvantages when you are not based in the Silicon
Valley...you simply don't have access to 1st class talent that has done the
same task at 2 other high growth startups before.

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alexcason
This is what arrogance looks like folks.

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amberakselrad
also what inexperience looks like :)

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dmur
As an outsider to scaling issues, what strikes me about SoundCloud's struggles
with shedding their Rails past is how similar their problems sound to
Twitter's problems. Granted, a microblogging service has a different set of
concerns than an audio delivery service, but the pain is the same.

Going out on a limb, perhaps this similarity contributes to the reasoning for
the Twitter/SoundCloud acquisition rumors: more exciting problems for Twitter
engineers to solve now that they've tamed their own beast? Or to put the
theory in a business light, Twitter engineering leadership may have confidence
they can architect SoundCloud better than the SoundCloud team has done.

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easymovet
Great product with some impressive traffic numbers! Looks like a good
candidate for flow based programming. side-note: I'd happily pay for streaming
that had less compression applied.

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joshdance
My company currently is facing the task of breaking up the monolith. Not going
to be fun. Glad that others had this problem as well and solved it in
manageable ways. Thanks for sharing.

