🎂 Finagle’s 7th Birthday

Seven years ago a simple commit got Finagle’s open source repository started. Finagle began as a means of dealing with the complexity and fragility of distributed systems issues here at Twitter. While distributed systems remain complex and it is not a silver bullet, Finagle has enabled a great many to build resilient, high throughput applications.

The pace of development remains high — with over 1,600 commits in the past year across Finagle, Finatra, Util, Scrooge, and TwitterServer. It is unlikely to slow down with 13 devs on the core team. Externally the community adoption is broad, spawned a company, and inspired versions in C++ and Rust.

With a wide user base numbering into the hundreds of services, our development philosophy has changed focus over the years. There has been a shift to capabilities that service owners get for free — simply redeploy with the latest version and voilà! Examples include retry budgets, HTTP/2, improved throughput, and admission control with automatic retries among others.

While you’d now consider a robust RPC library table stakes in microservice deployments, that was not the case in 2010. We’re proud of Finagle’s consistent progress and excited about Future[Finagle].

Here’s to the next 7 years,

Kevin Oliver and the Core Systems Libraries team