As of 2017, Slack was handling a peak of 1.4 billion jobs a day, (33,000 jobs every second). Until recently, Slack had continued to depend on their initial job queue implementation system based on Redis. While it had allowed them to grow exponentially and diversify their services, they soon outgrew the existing system. Also, dequeuing jobs required memory that was unavailable. Allowing job workers to scale up further burdened Redis, slowing the entire system.
Slack decided to use Kafka to ease the process and allow them to scale up without getting rid of the existing architecture. To build on it, they added Kafka in front of Redis leaving the existing queuing interface in place. A stateless service called Kafkagate was developed in Go to enqueue jobs to Kafka. It exposes an HTTP POST interface with each request comprising a topic, partition, and content. Kafkagate's design reduces latency while writing jobs and allows greater flexibility in job queue design. JQRelay, a stateless service, is used to relay jobs from a Kafka topic to Redis. It ensures only one relay process is assigned to each topic, failures are self-healing, and job-specific errors are corrected by re-enqueuing the job to Kafka. The new system was rolled out by double writing all jobs to both Redis and Kafka, with JQRelay operating in 'shadow mode' - dropping all jobs after reading it from Kafka. Jobs were verified by being tracked at each part of the system through its lifetime. By using durable storage and JQRelay, the enqueuing rate could be paused or adjusted to give Redis the necessary breathing room and make Slack a much more resilient service.
