Twitter is not abandoning Rails

TechCrunch posted a rumor yesterday that Twitter was going to ditch Rails for PHP or something else. This is not true. Evan Williams tweeted that this was indeed false:

“FWIW: Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR. Lots of our code is not in RoR, already, though. Maybe that’s why people are confused.”

I loved David’s response to the scaling argument in a recent eWeek article:

“This is known as the ‘Last Stance’ defense. When you have nothing of left of substance to argue with, you draw the ‘But does it scale?’ card. This is on page one of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt playbook.”

Wikipedia defines scalability as, “ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.” We can do that with Ruby and Rails, just as you can do that with many other programming languages and frameworks. People seem to forget that scalability is not simply a matter of code but the architecture of the application and the infrastructure the app is sitting on. If you design an application without growth in mind you’ll have issues, hands down. If you host your application on shared hosting and don’t give it the resources it needs you’re going to have issues.

“Can Rails scale?” is the wrong question to be asking. The right question is “how do we scale properly?”