When an HTTP request comes in, it hits an external load balancer (an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer). The architecture is standard – a MySQL database, Redis for caching, and then Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS) to run jobs asynchronously. They make use of both traditional Java libraries, such as Hibernate for ORM, and Guice for dependency injection, as well as libraries written in Kotlin such as Wire for protocol buffers and OkHTTP for network requests. At the end of 2020, Faire raised 170M at a 2.5B valuation and is now looking to expand into Europe.įaire’s backend monolith is written entirely in Kotlin, as are the new services they create as they seek to replace the old monolith system. The platform is backed by investors, such as Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global. Originating in the US, Faire is a wholesale marketplace that aims to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) to compete against the likes of Amazon and Walmart and chase their dreams. Go to the Kotlin for server-side page to learn more. Kotlin is an excellent choice for server-side application development.

Let’s look at Faire’s journey together with Jeff.

Using Kotlin makes the engineering team happier.

Easy to get started as a Java developer, making hiring easier.

Interop with Java makes it easy to use existing Java libraries.

Kotlin improves developers’ productivity thanks to its modern language features, and helps avoid common Java mistakes.The key benefits of Kotlin he identified were: We chatted with Jeff Gulbronson, a software engineer who has been with Faire since it was a year old, about Faire and why it chose Kotlin. The current backend repo has 788,020 lines of code within 6,078 Kotlin files, with roughly 45 engineers actively committing code and more onboarding every week. They now use Kotlin for their Android app and for the website backend, which successfully handles up to 1K requests per second. Having started with Java, a year in, the company started looking for other options, and opted for Kotlin.

Like most startups, at the beginning of its journey Faire was looking for an efficient solution to base its tech stack on.

Kotlin for backend