Sri AnnamalaiAn architecture review that cancelled a rewrite
A three-week review that replaced a planned eighteen-month rewrite with four months of targeted work.
- Eighteen-month rewrite cancelled before any code was written
- p99 dispatch latency cut from 4.1s to 380ms in four months
- Two of five proposed services shipped; the other three proved unnecessary
Orbital had board approval for a rewrite and a slide deck explaining why the current system could not scale. The deck was well argued and, as it turned out, wrong about where the time was going.
Three weeks of measurement found that 94% of dispatch latency sat in a single N+1 query path behind a cache that had silently stopped being warmed in 2024.
The review recommended four months of targeted work instead. The rewrite was cancelled. Two of the five proposed services were built; the other three were never needed once the latency was gone.
- Go
- Postgres
- Redis
- Kubernetes