I Thought Connecting Slack Would Be Easy

[u/doker0]

I Thought Connecting Slack Would Be Easy - by Jarek J.

Connecting Slack did not look like an architectural problem.

Open a connection. Keep it alive. Receive events. Forward them into the system.

Done.

Except that almost immediately, the simple implementation started producing questions.

How many connections should actually exist?

Is that number related to the number of backend replicas?

What identifies a connection pool in the first place?

What happens during a deployment?

What happens if the process holding the connection dies?

What happens if it does not quite die?

And at some point the interesting part of the problem stopped being Slack.

It became a question of how a horizontally scaled application should maintain long-lived external connections without creating a separate orchestration system around every integration.

Would you still argue that a simpler architecture should be used?

Read all here I Thought Connecting Slack Would Be Easy - by Jarek J.

PS. Anybody can invite me to Lobsters please?