Why We Moved from Ruby to Golang: An Infrastructure Perspective
Introduction
In today’s fast-paced software development world, choosing the right technology stack is crucial to long-term success.
While Ruby has long been a favorite for rapid development and ease of use, as applications scale, infrastructure demands can grow substantially. In this article, we’ll dive into our journey of moving from Ruby to Golang (Go), highlighting the infrastructure-related challenges that motivated this transition and the tangible benefits we’ve observed, including reduced costs.
1. Performance and Concurrency Handling
Ruby’s Concurrency Bottleneck
Ruby, particularly with frameworks like Rails, is well-suited for building web applications quickly. However, Ruby’s concurrency model has historically been a major challenge, especially with its Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in MRI (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter). This means that multi-threaded applications in Ruby often struggle to fully utilize modern multi-core processors. As the number of concurrent users and requests grows, the infrastructure (servers and instances) can become strained, requiring more resources to handle the same load.
Go’s Lightweight Goroutines
Go was designed from the ground up for modern multi-core architectures. Its goroutines are extremely lightweight compared to Ruby’s threads. With Go, we can spawn thousands of goroutines for concurrent operations without hitting the same resource bottlenecks as Ruby. The built-in concurrency model with channels simplifies multi-threaded programming and allows us to maximize hardware utilization.
Impact on Infrastructure:
- Ruby: To handle a high level of concurrency, Ruby applications require multiple server instances, and load balancers.
- Go: A single Go application can handle thousands of concurrent requests efficiently, reducing the need for additional server instances and simplifying infrastructure management.
2. Memory and CPU Efficiency
Ruby’s Higher Memory Footprint
Ruby applications are often associated with high memory usage. With each new request and object allocation, the memory footprint can grow quickly, leading to a need for larger servers or additional instances to handle increased traffic. This, in turn, raises both memory and server management costs. Moreover, Ruby’s garbage collection can introduce latency, which impacts performance in high-traffic systems. In our case, we noticed that our previous Ruby on Rails application struggled with memory release over time, necessitating frequent restarts due to memory constraints. This could stem from suboptimal code or inherent inefficiencies in Ruby on Rails itself.
Go’s Memory Efficiency
Go, on the other hand, is built with memory efficiency in mind. It handles memory allocation more effectively and features a low-latency garbage collector optimized for long-running server applications. As a result, Go applications typically consume far less memory than their Ruby counterparts under the same load, allowing for the use of smaller instances or fewer resources to serve the same number of users. After migrating to Go, we monitored the memory usage of our Go application and observed that its memory consumption remained relatively stable over time.
Impact on Infrastructure:
- Ruby: More memory usage means larger cloud instances (higher tiers) or additional VMs, leading to higher costs.
- Go: Lower memory usage translates to smaller, cheaper cloud instances or fewer machines, directly reducing operational costs.
3. Binary Deployments vs. Interpreter Overhead
Ruby’s Interpretation Overhead
Ruby is an interpreted language, meaning that every time an application is run, the interpreter needs to parse and execute the code. This adds runtime overhead, which can slow down applications and increase CPU usage.
Go’s Compiled Binaries
Go is a compiled language, producing self-contained binaries that are highly optimized for performance. Once compiled, there is no runtime interpreter needed. This not only speeds up execution but also simplifies deployment. There’s no need to ship an interpreter or deal with dependency management in production environments.
Impact on Infrastructure:
- Ruby: Requires an interpreter and often a more complex deployment pipeline, resulting in higher deployment and server management costs.
- Go: Simpler, faster deployments with standalone binaries, leading to reduced server maintenance and faster start-up times.
As illustrated in the image above, our Go application used just 45m CPU core, whereas the Ruby application consumed 109m CPU core for the same workload. This significant reduction highlights Go’s efficiency in resource utilization compared to Ruby.
• 45m CPU core (Go): This means the Go application is using a small fraction of a CPU core — specifically 45 milli-core, which is 45/1000th of a single CPU core. It implies that the Go app requires significantly less CPU power to perform the same tasks.
• 109m CPU core (Ruby): On the other hand, the Ruby application uses 109 milli-core, or 109/1000th of a single CPU core. This is more than double the CPU consumption of the Go app, indicating that Ruby is less efficient in terms of CPU utilization for the same workload.
In essence, the numbers show that the Go application uses less CPU resources, which means it can handle tasks more efficiently, reducing operational costs and improving performance. This efficiency can lead to better scalability and lower infrastructure requirements, especially in high-load environments.
4. Scaling and Autoscaling
Ruby’s Horizontal Scaling Challenges
To scale a Ruby application, especially with Rails, horizontal scaling is typically required. As traffic grows, more server instances are added, along with load balancers to distribute requests. However, scaling Ruby applications horizontally can be resource-intensive and slow. The more instances you add, the more memory, CPU, and network bandwidth you consume.
Go’s Scalability Advantages
Go’s performance characteristics make it far more scalable with fewer resources. Thanks to its concurrency model, a single instance of a Go application can handle more requests than multiple Ruby instances. This minimizes the need for horizontal scaling, and when scaling is necessary, Go’s efficiency makes it possible to scale with far fewer resources.
Impact on Infrastructure:
- Ruby: Scaling Ruby apps typically involves more server instances, complex autoscaling policies, and more operational overhead.
- Go: Efficient scaling with fewer instances, leading to reduced cloud or infrastructure costs.
5. Simplified Microservices Architecture
Many companies, including ours, are moving towards microservices architectures. While Ruby can be used for microservices, its resource-heavy nature and slower performance make it less than ideal. Running multiple Ruby microservices can quickly escalate infrastructure costs due to higher CPU and memory usage.
Impact on Infrastructure:
• Ruby: More resources are needed to run multiple services, often leading to a bloated microservices architecture.
- Go: Lightweight microservices consume fewer resources, making it possible to run more services on fewer servers, reducing infrastructure costs.
Conclusion: Cost Reduction
After transitioning from Ruby to Go, we’ve seen a significant reduction in both infrastructure costs and complexity. By leveraging Go’s high performance, memory efficiency, concurrency model, and simple deployments, we reduced our server footprint, minimized the number of instances required, and optimized resource utilization.
Key Takeaways:
- Reduced server costs due to Go’s lower resource usage.
- Simplified infrastructure management thanks to Go’s binary deployments and lower dependency needs.
- Improved scalability with fewer server instances and more efficient handling of concurrency.
If you’re facing scaling challenges or high infrastructure costs with your current tech stack, consider making the move to Go. As we’ve experienced firsthand, Go’s efficiency in memory usage, CPU consumption, and concurrency handling can lead to significant cost savings and performance improvements. Whether you’re building new applications or optimizing existing ones, Go offers a modern solution for scalable, high-performance services.
Start your journey towards better infrastructure today by exploring Go’s capabilities. Have any insights to share? Drop a comment below or reach out — we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences!
