Improving the Duolingo experience with request tracing

Improving the Duolingo experience with request tracing

摘要

Duolingo works to improve the performance of our apps for all of our learners. As Duolingo has grown over time with new courses, features, and millions of additional users, several teams are working behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly. This post will focus on a backend feature called Request Tracing that has led to significant improvements in performance.

Duolingo is steadily moving from a monolithic architecture (a few large, tightly-coupled services) to a microservice architecture (many small, loosely-coupled services). This has its advantages, but also has tradeoffs, including operational complexity and observability.