Kraken’s migration to Rust microservices - with Rob Ede

Rob Ede, Senior Rust Engineer at Kraken and lead maintainer of the actix project, and Mainmatter’s Founder Marco Otte-Witte discuss the history of the actix and actix-web projects, and how Rob became a maintainer.

Marco and Rob talk about Kraken’s migration to Rust microservices and the significant performance improvements, massive drop in memory usage, and substantial reductions in AWS spending it brought along. They also emphasize the stability advancements that Rust provides, and Rob highlights that errors like null pointer exceptions that were frequent in Java are no longer possible in Rust.

Finally, they discuss updates in Rust’s web development ecosystem and actix specifically, and Rob shares his view on how improvements in the language and framework space will eventually lead to a future where web development in Rust can be as approachable as development with e.g. express.js.