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Our journey from a Python monolith to a managed platform  ↦

Dropbox Engineering tells the tale of their new SOA:

The majority of software developers at Dropbox contribute to server-side backend code, and all server side development takes place in our server monorepo. We mostly use Python for our server-side product development, with more than 3 million lines of code belonging to our monolithic Python server.

It works, but we realized the monolith was also holding us back as we grew.

This is an excellent, deep re-telling of their goals, decisions, setbacks, and progress. Here’s the major takeaway, if you don’t have time for a #longread:

The single most important takeaway from this multi-year effort is that well-thought-out code composition, early in a project’s lifetime, is essential. Otherwise, technical debt and code complexity compounds very quickly.


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