A biological and human approach to architecture: How New Relic builds to scale

Software architecture is usually seen as a technical challenge (18 million requests per minute), but the real problems are human problems (33 teams). New Relic tackles both aspects by taking lessons from biology to build a resilient architecture that will grow with the company. Brent Miller shares New Relic's approach and explores the costs and benefits of using this kind of strategy.

When building resilient, fault-tolerant, scalable systems, we focus quite a bit on the particular technologies involved. Can they scale horizontally? Is Samza better than Storm? Is this library thread-safe? It turns out that even though those questions matter to the stability of the system, they aren’t as important as the people building the system. Humans choose the stack, write the code, and write the bugs, too. They create the weird edge cases that cause the system to fall over at the worst time. New Relic has taken an unusual approach to building software: it draws heavily from biological metaphors like mutation and natural selection and focuses on a human-centric approach to define its architecture. Rather than trust a few armchair architects to make the decisions, New Relic puts the power in the hands of the teams wrestling with the code. New Relic has many strategies that ensure cohesiveness across the architecture and scalability for the business, the engineering organization, and the software, but it takes a little leap of faith and a lot of trust to move to this new approach. Brent Miller shares how New Relic’s process works and how it manages growth without going off the rails while increasing system stability. OFFICE HOURS Brent will take part in Office Hours on Wednesday, April 13 at 12:15 PM in the Mercury Complex. Come by and meet him!