Flannel: Slack’s Secret to Scale

Presentation by Milena Talavera, Senior Engineering Manager, Slack at the 2018 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit: geekwire.com/cloudsummit
In order for a company to grow and thrive, it must scale ahead of customer growth, maintaining both a reliable and flexible infrastructure that supports rapid development. As its user base grew, Slack’s previous system for managing users, channels, and associated messages remained viable for smaller customers, but risked a slower startup time and client overhead for much larger teams. To address this, Slack engineers created Flannel, an application-level caching service developed in-house and deployed to edge points-of-presence. Slack’s Engineering Manager, Milena Talavera, will discuss how Flannel - first deployed in January 2017 between Web Client, Mobile and Backend engineering teams - increases scalability in Slack, along with ongoing initiatives for Flannel, like addressing thundering herd problems and achieving high availability.