Uber’s Ringpop with Jeff Wolski

Uber has a software architecture with unique requirements. Uber does not have the firehose of user engagement data that Twitter or Facebook has, but each transaction on Uber is both high value and time-sensitive. Users are paying for transportation that they expect to be available and reasonably close by. When Uber’s system is trying to match a rider with a driver, availability is favored over consistency. It is important that the rider can always get some driver, even if it is not the best driver.
Ringpop is a system built at Uber to provide scalable, fault-tolerant, application layer sharding. Ringpop consists of a membership protocol, consistent hashing, and forwarding capabilities. Jeff Wolski is a software engineer at Uber working in Ringpop, and he joins the show to explain how Ringpop brings coordination to distributed applications.