How To Stay Responsive With 400 Backends (retired)

In these days of web scale and microservices, gracefully handling faulty or crashing web services becomes increasingly important. As long as your application uses just a handful of such external systems, there’s no problem. But what if you have hundreds of them? How will you prevent your application from the negative effects of inevitable incidental crashes or timeouts when contacting other systems?

In this talk, we’ll take a real-world case from a web scale system. This system is targeted at 7 million users and has around 400 heterogeneous external integrations. Akka and Scala power a system that is capable of running smoothly even when some of these services might not be so stable.