Backend - DoorDash Engineering Blog

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Backend Failure Mitigation for Microservices: An Intro to Aperture

Learn how centralizing service monitoring and controlling into a single system improves upon individual service level mitigation efforts

Cong Ma

Matt Ranney

19 Minute Read

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 9 Minute Read

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 7 Minute Read

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 11 Minute Read

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 11 Minute Read

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 9 Minute Read

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 12 Minute Read

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 10 Minute Read

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 6 Minute Read

Backend Culture Data General Machine Learning Mobile Web

2020 Hindsight: Building Reliability and Innovating at DoorDash

DoorDash recaps a number of its engineering highlights from 2020, including its microservices architecture, data platform, and new frontend development.