My presentation about Building LinkedIn's Next Generation Architecture with OSGi is live on the EclipseCon web site (slides + audio). Here is the abstract:

Over the course of the last 5 years, LinkedIn has been built using relatively simple technologies: front end web applications (tomcat/servlet/jsp), backend services (jetty/spring remoting), databases, replication, jms. Although the web site was scaling adequately, LinkedIn had some big challenges to overcome:

  • a growing engineering team working on a monolithic code base (albeit modular)
  • a growing product team wanting more and more features, faster
  • a growing operations team deploying more and more servers
  • and more...

    • In March of 2008, a group of Senior Engineers started a project to explore the best available technologies which could help in building the next generation of the architecture that would address those challenges. The new architecture involved using OSGI/Spring DM as the foundation because it had the right properties we were interested in. The code was migrated to a more modular paradigm using binary consumption.

    This session will demonstrate how we integrated OSGi, the pros and cons of the changes, the pain points as well as the migration strategy.