Building reliable systems with DoorDash's Matt Ranney

Description

In this conversation with DoorDash's Matt Ranney, a principal software engineer, they discuss how DoorDash builds reliable systems. You can listen to the whole podcast episode here: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/big-ideas-podcast/matt-ranney-doordash/ Matt Ranney emphasizes the importance of finding productivity angels in smaller teams with more automation, and how understanding that unit testing isn't the only valuable metric can lead to building more efficient infrastructure systems. Matt also discusses the pros and cons of Kubernetes and microsystems, and provides call-to-actions when Doordash experiences failures or downtimes on microservices. He stresses the importance of acknowledging that partial failure is still complete failure, and how taking steps to prevent and mitigate these failures can greatly improve overall system reliability. A few key themes: • Finding productivity angels: Discover the importance of finding productivity angels in smaller teams with more automation. • Valuable metrics beyond unit testing: Unit testing is important but don’t let it get in the way. • Get tips on how to prevent downtime and mitigate failures on microservices • The importance and power of Change Data Capture Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Big Ideas in App Architecture with Matt Ranney from DoorDash 00:32 Who is Matt Ranney? 07:09 Working on self-driving cars at Uber 16:37 The danger of optimizing for the wrong metric 21:56 Did we over-rotate on microservices? 22:51 Who needs access to Kubernetes? 25:28 The most important thing to know before adopting microservices 30:05 Chaos engineering vs fault injection 33:35 What does it mean for DoorDash when a system goes down? 36:08 How DoorDash makes systems more reliable 36:46 How CockroachDB is used at DoorDash #CockroachDB #distributedsql Related Content: https://doordash.engineering/2022/04/25/using-fault-injection-testing-to-improve-doordash-reliability/ https://doordash.engineering/2023/03/21/using-cockroachdb-to-reduce-feature-store-costs-by-75/ https://doordash.engineering/2023/02/07/how-we-scaled-new-verticals-fulfillment-backend-with-cockroachdb/