Backend
Migrating From Python to Kotlin for Our Backend Services
To support our migration to microservices we needed to find a new tech stack. Learn how we compared all the options and chose Kotlin
Matt
Anger
Backend General
Gradual Code Releases Using an In-House Kubernetes Canary Controller
New service releases deployed into DoorDash’s microservice architecture immediately begin processing and serving their entire volume of production traffic. If one of those services is buggy, however, customers may have a degraded experience or the site may go down completely. Although we currently have a traffic management solution under development for gradual service rollouts as ...
MarcoChirico
Backend General
Optimizing OpenTelemetry’s Span Processor for High Throughput and Low CPU Costs
When companies move to microservices, they need to address a new challenge of setting up distributed tracing to identify availability or performance issues throughout the platform. While various tools offered on the market or through open-source perform this task, there is often a lack of standardization, making leveraging these tools costly or complicated. As DoorDash ...
Santosh
Banda
Backend General
Examining Problematic Memory in C/C++ Applications with BPF, perf, and Memcheck
As applications grow in complexity, memory stability is often neglected, causing problems to appear over time. When applications experience consequences of problematic memory implementations, developers may find it difficult to pinpoint the root cause. While there are tools available that automate detecting memory issues, those tools often require re-running the application in special environments, resulting ...
Filip
Busic
Backend
How to Make Kafka Consumer Compatible with Gevent in Python
Asynchronous task management using Gevent improves scalability and resource efficiency for distributed systems. However, using this tool with Kafka can be challenging. At DoorDash, many services are Python-based, including the technologies RabbitMQ and Celery, which were central to our platform’s asynchronous task-queue system. We also leverage Gevent, a coroutine-based concurrency library, to further improve the ...
Jessica
Zhao
Boyang
Wei
Backend Web
Serving Multiple Websites and Business Logic From a Single Platform
Building flexibility into the DoorDash platform lets us scale to serve a variety of retailers.
Daniel
Shafer
Backend
Building a More Reliable Checkout Service at Scale with Kotlin
In 2020, DoorDash engineers extracted the consumer order checkout flow out of our monolithic service and reimplemented it in a new Kotlin microservice service. This effort, part of our migration from a monolithic codebase to a microservices architecture, increases our platform’s performance, reliability, and scalability. The consumer checkout flow is one of the most critical ...
Yimin
Wei
Zhengli
Sun
Amiraj
Dhawan
Backend
Using Active Probing to Detect Infrastructure Failures
DoorDash engineers built Infra Prober, a new monitoring tool, to continually look for component failures and provide accurate alerts.
Shannon
Li
Backend
Improving Scalability, Reliability, and Efficiency of a Python Service with Gevent
When trying to scale a distributed system a common obstacle is not that there aren’t enough resources available, it’s that they are not being used efficiently. At DoorDash we found a similar opportunity when working to scale our point-of-sale system (POS). We were experiencing outages because our POS system could not scale to meet peak ...
Simone
Restelli
Devavrath
Subramanyam
Backend
Building a gRPC Client Standard with Open Source to Boost Reliability and Velocity
In a microservice architecture, cross-service communication happens under a set of global rules that are hard to effectively enforce across all services without standardizing client-service communication. Relying on individual service client implementations to adhere to these rules means a lot of additional repeated work on individual teams, which has a negative impact on developer velocity. ...
Haitham
Gabr
Backend
Platform Optimization Through Better API Design
As DoorDash migrated to a microservices architecture, we found an opportunity to redesign our APIs, resulting in better overall client performance.
Maggie
Fang
Backend
Tailoring Gradle and Docker for Rapid Local Development
As technology companies race to release their next features, any delay in productivity can be extremely detrimental, making an efficient development build process essential. Companies that use Kubernetes and Docker in production environments most likely use Docker for local development. Docker-compose, a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications, ensures consistent local development processes, ...
Marvin
Flores
Juvenal
Santos
Lin
Du
MarcoChirico
Santosh
Banda
Filip
Busic
Jessica
Zhao
Boyang
Wei
Daniel
Shafer
Yimin
Wei
Zhengli
Sun
Amiraj
Dhawan
Shannon
Li
Simone
Restelli
Maggie
Fang
Marvin
Flores