Open Networking & Edge Summit 2020

With the adoption of microservices, organizations face a challenge: how to implement shared behaviors across services written in different languages, running on different hosts, without sacrificing performance or developer velocity?

Solutions such as sharing code lead to bloated services and restricting what language a service can be written in. They also make it hard to roll out upgrades: a change to a shared library might require updating dozens of services.

At Yelp, we built a "smart" HTTP proxy on top of OpenResty, nginx, and Lua which lets us move complexity into the infrastructure itself. It now fronts all traffic at Yelp, parsing, shaping, and routing requests. It has enabled us to have smaller and more efficient services.

This talk will cover why Yelp favors "smarts in the infrastructure" and the creation of a routing service. It will also discuss why we chose to build on top of an open source proxy, and how it enabled us to launch a critical service within just a few weeks.