Nick Rockwell

So, the shift from Amazon EC2 to Google App Engine and generally #AWS to #GCP was a long decision and in the end, it's one that we've taken with eyes open and that we reserve the right to modify at any time. And to be clear, we continue to do a lot of stuff with AWS. But, by default, the content of the decision was, for our consumer-facing products, we're going to use GCP first. And if there's some reason why we don't think that's going to work out great, then we'll happily use AWS. In practice, that hasn't really happened. We've been able to meet almost 100% of our needs in GCP.

So it's basically mostly Google Kubernetes Engine , we're mostly running stuff on Kubernetes right now.

#AWStoGCPmigration #cloudmigration #migration

We really drank the Google Kool-Aid on analytics. So, everything's going into Google BigQuery and almost everything is going straight into Google Cloud Pub/Sub and then doing some processing in Google Cloud Dataflow before ending up in BigQuery. We still do too much processing and augmentation on the front end before it goes into Pub/Sub. And that's using some kind of stuff we pulled together using Amazon DynamoDB and so on. And it's very brittle, actually. Actually, Dynamo throttling is one of our biggest headaches. So, I want all of that to go away and do all our augmentation in BigQuery after the data's been collected. And having it just go straight into Pub/Sub. So, we're working on that. And it'll happen, some time. #Analytics #AnalyticsPipeline

When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.