Connecting Ruby and Elixir microservices

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Connecting Ruby and Elixir microservices in a high-load gaming platform Daniils Petrovs - Backend Developer @ Platogo Interactive Entertainment GmbH. How we handle thousands of concurrent players on web and mobile gRPC inside!

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whoami? - Backend Developer primarily - Experience in micro services, Erlang/ Elixir/Ruby - Also do development in Go and Clojure - Occasionally contribute to open source on Github

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Who are we? - Social gaming company based in Vienna, Austria 🇦🇹 - Developing a social multiplayer platform for 10+ years (with < 25 people) - Backend, front end and design teams - Multiple micro services in Elixir and Go, with single Ruby monolith

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25K+ concurrent users

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~7000 Spins per second

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Our Platform Migrated to micro services w/ Service Mesh • One Ruby monolith • A few Elixir micro services • A few Go micro services • K8s on AWS EKS with Trae f ik and Linkerd • Multiple CDNs and databases • Ka f ka and RabbitMQ

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Moving Wallet out • Main app shouldn’t be responsible for balances, transactions and game sessions • Hitting limitations of Ruby • Solid inter-micro-service communication options became available • Linkerd available as lightweight service mesh with load balancing and tracing support

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Setting up the repositories • Protobuf de f initions in the Wallet server repo in a shared umbrella app • “Client” repositories relatively f ind the de f initions to generate stubs

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On Ruby side • Ruby gRPC support is of f icially supported • Easily generated client stubs (Ruby classes) from Protobuf de f initions Things were looking good! $ rails generate_grpc

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On Elixir side • Original Elixir gRPC fork was abandoned - until 2022! • Now nearly feature complete and actively developed • Mix tasks were released by OffgridElectric wrapping protoc • Still slower than e.g. Go implementation, but fast enough for us Not as great initially! $ mix compile.proto Generated protobuf app Generated escript protoc-gen-elixir with MIX_ENV=prod compile.clean gsm.pb.ex compile.clean wallet.pb.ex compile.proto apps/shared/gsm.proto apps/shared/wallet.proto

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Putting it all together

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Putting it all together

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Bonus: Supporting client apps

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Game Launcher Tool written in Elixir, uses gRPC stub under the hood to perform game launch f low.

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Game Launcher • Only for development without client builds • Stub client generated from the same de f initions • Uses gRPC channel wrapped in a GenServer • Took ~3 days to build for f irst partner Using gRPC client

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Results? • All active users on both apps migrated to Wallet service in 2022 • No gRPC related bottlenecks yet

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Future?

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• Explore using gRPC server on PAS monolith (to let other services request stuff from it directly) • Maybe explore using gRPC on end user client side? • Develop more development and debugging tools (e.g. Go-based CLI for sending gRPC requests to services)

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Thank You & Danke schön!

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Links • @danirukun • Github • https://danpetrov.xyz - personal website & blog • www.platogo.com - company website (and yes, we are hiring!) • https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc • https://github.com/OffgridElectric/protobuf_compiler