Miguel Conde & Peter Compernolle: Inside Gusto’s Rails Biolith

Описание: In this episode of OnRails, Robby is joined by Miguel Conde and Peter Compernolle from Gusto, where they work on a "biolith" - two distinct Rails monoliths serving 600+ engineers. Peter leads the HIPAA-compliant benefits domain, while Miguel is extracting the time product from the main monolith. They explore how Gusto identifies boundaries, manages temporal data, handles eventual consistency, and navigates the trade-offs of GraphQL federation.

[00:00:00] – Intro and welcome to Miguel and Peter from Gusto
[00:01:08] – What keeps them "On Rails" and Rails' speed advantage
[00:02:51] – The "biolith" setup and HIPAA compliance separation
[00:07:55] – Working in the larger monolith versus benefits app
[00:10:15] – Identifying boundaries when extracting services
[00:11:28] – How Packwerk helps define and detect dependencies
[00:13:47] – Why Sorbet transformed Packwerk's usefulness
[00:21:49] – Enforcing boundaries Rails doesn't give by default
[00:26:56] – Making Active Record models private with Explicit Active Record
[00:34:47] – Rethinking database normalization and snapshots
[00:39:34] – Temporal and bi-temporal data for audit trails
[00:46:45] – Company Pool system for scrubbed production data
[01:06:10] – How GraphQL federation affects service boundaries
[01:12:20] – Rails as a Formula One car: fast but tricky with weight
[01:29:57] – Book recommendations and learning by building

Socials:
Miguel:   / miguelconde  
Peter:   / petercompernolle  

Company:
Homepage: https://gusto.com/
Engineering Blog: https://engineering.gusto.com/

🧰 Tools & Libraries Mentioned
ActiveAdmin: Admin UI for Rails.
(https://activeadmin.info/)
after_commit_everywhere: Run code after commits. (https://github.com/Envek/after_commit...)
Datadog: App and CI/CD observability.
(https://www.datadoghq.com/)
FactoryBot: Build test data.
(https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory...)
GraphQL: API layer for SPAs.
(https://graphql.org/)
Kafka: Event streaming backbone.
(https://kafka.apache.org/)
Packwerk: Enforce boundaries in monoliths. (https://github.com/Shopify/packwerk)
PaperTrail: Model change auditing.
(https://github.com/paper-trail-gem/pa...)
React: Front-end framework.
(https://react.dev/)
Sidekiq: Background job processing.
(https://sidekiq.org/)
Sorbet: Gradual Ruby types.
(https://sorbet.org/)
TypeScript: Typed JavaScript.
(https://www.typescriptlang.org/)
explicit_activerecord: Guard writes to models.
(https://github.com/Gusto/explicit_act...)
Ruby Koans: Learn Ruby by practice.
(https://www.rubykoans.com/)
Cracking the Coding Interview: Interview prep book. (https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Codin...)
Gusto Engineering Blog: Posts from Gusto engineers. (https://engineering.gusto.com/)

#rails #rubyonrails #tech #Gusto

On Rails is a podcast focused on real-world technical decision-making, exploring how teams are scaling, architecting, and solving complex challenges with Rails.

On Rails is brought to you by The Rails Foundation, and hosted by Robby Russell of Planet Argon, a consultancy that helps teams improve and modernize their existing Ruby on Rails apps