Rust in Production

Most Rust in Production stories are about scale and performance. This one is a story about low-cost phones and patchy mobile connections in Africa, where a student is learning maths over WhatsApp. The whole point is to support hundreds of thousands of students cheaply enough to run at government scale. My guest is Dylan Brown, a Senior Engineering Manager at Rising Academies, and he comes at Rust...

There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with maintaining software at the very bottom of someone else's stack. ClickHouse lives in exactly that spot: roughly 1.5 million lines of mostly C++ and tens of millions of tests every single day. So what happens when you start introducing Rust into a codebase like that? Not as a rewrite, but linked into a C++ server with a CMake build process that...

I don't know about you, but to me there are few things as interesting as the hardware/software interface: the point where carefully written code meets the messy, physical world of sensors, lenses, and real-time constraints. It's where a clever abstraction either holds up or falls apart the moment a real signal hits it. That makes Veo a perfect guest. The Copenhagen-based company builds AI-powered...

Hot off the press: this episode is a live recording from Rust Week in Utrecht, just two days ago. On stage with me are two people who hardly need an introduction in the Linux world: Greg Kroah-Hartman , Linux Foundation Fellow, stable kernel maintainer and an ambassador for the kernel, and Alice Ryhl , core maintainer of Tokio and one of the driving forces behind Rust for Linux at Google. I have t...

Every time you load a website, send an email, or update an app, you're quietly relying on a handful of unglamorous services that route your packets to the right place: DNS to translate names into addresses, and BGP to figure out how to actually get there. When these systems break, or get attacked, the Internet doesn't just slow down but stops working. For more than 25 years, NLnet Labs has been on...

Jon Gjengset is one of the most recognizable names in the Rust community, the author of Rust for Rustaceans , a prolific live-streamer, and a long-time contributor to the Rust ecosystem. Today he works as a Principal Engineer at Helsing, a European defense company that has made Rust a foundational part of its engineering stack. Helsing builds safety-critical software for real-world defense applica...

Rust adoption can be loud, like when companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google announce their use of Rust in high-profile projects. But there are countless smaller teams quietly using Rust to solve real-world problems, sometimes even without noticing. This episode tells one such story. Cian and his team at Cloudsmith have been adopting Rust in their Python monolith not because they wanted to r...

Space exploration demands software that is reliable, efficient, and able to operate in the harshest environments imaginable. When a spacecraft deploys a solar sail millions of kilometers from Earth, there's no room for memory bugs, race conditions, or software failures. This is where Rust's robustness guarantees become mission-critical.  In this episode, we speak with Sebastian Scholz, an eng...

Radar processes billions of location events daily, powering geofencing and location APIs for companies like Uber, Lyft, and thousands of other apps. When their existing infrastructure started hitting performance and cost limits, they built HorizonDB, a specialized database which replaced both Elasticsearch and MongoDB with a custom single binary written in Rust and backed by RocksDB. In this episo...

As we close the chapter on 2025 and celebrate our second year of 'Rust in Production', it's time to reflect on the highlights of the 17 episodes since our last holiday special. We looked at Rust from all angles, from cloud infrastructure to embedded systems, and from robotics to satellite technology. One thing that all these stories have in common is the passion and dedication of the Rust communit...

Bringing Rust into the Linux kernel is one of the most ambitious modernization efforts in open source history. The Linux kernel, with its decades of C code and deeply ingrained development practices, is now opening its doors to a memory-safe language. It's the first time in over 30 years that a new programming language has been officially adopted for kernel development. But the journey is far from...

What does it take to rewrite the foundational components of one of the world's most popular Linux distributions? Ubuntu serves over 12 million daily desktop users alone, and the systems that power it, from sudo to core utilities, have been running for decades with what Jon Seager, VP of Engineering for Ubuntu at Canonical, calls "shaky underpinnings." In this episode, we talk to Jon about the bold...

Building a new programming language from scratch is a monumental undertaking. In this episode, we talk to Richard Feldman, creator of the Roc programming language, about building a functional language that is fast, friendly, and functional. We discuss why the Roc team moved away from using Rust as a host language and instead is in the process of migrating to Zig. What was the decision-making proce...

How do you build a system that handles 90 million requests per second? That's the scale that Cloudflare operates at, processing roughly 25% of all internet traffic through their global network of 330+ edge locations. In this episode, we talk to Kevin Guthrie and Edward Wang from Cloudflare about Pingora, their open-source Rust-based proxy that replaced nginx across their entire infrastructure. We'...

Building autonomous robots that operate safely in the real world is one of the most challenging engineering problems today. When those robots carry sharp blades and work around people, the margin for error is razor-thin. In this episode, we talk to Andrew Tinka from Scythe Robotics about how they use Rust to build autonomous electric mowers for commercial landscaping. We discuss the unique challen...

Are you one of over 240 million subscribers of Amazon's Prime Video service? If so, you might be surprised to learn that much of the infrastructure behind Prime Video is built using Rust. They use a single codebase for media players, game consoles, and tablets. In this episode, we sit down with Alexandru Ene, a Principal Engineer at Amazon, to discuss how Rust is used at Prime Video, the challenge...

It’s time for another recap including our highlights of Season 4. We’ve been at this for a while now (four seasons, and 32 episodes to be exact). We had guests from a wide range of industries: from Microsoft to Astral, and from password managers to satellite systems. This time, it’s all about using Rust for foundational software, which is software that is critical to a team or even an entire organ...

As a kid, I was always fascinated by space tech. That fascination has only grown as I've learned more about the engineering challenges involved in space exploration. In this episode, we talk to Vegard Sandengen, a Rust engineer at KSAT, a company that provides ground station services for satellites. They use Rust to manage the data flow from hundreds of satellites, ensuring that data is received,...

Handling secrets is extremely hard. You have to keep them safe (obviously), while at the same time you need to integrate with a ton of different systems and always provide a great user-experience, because otherwise people will just find a way around your system. When talking to peers, a lot of people mention 1Password as a company that nailed this balance.

In today's episode, I talk to Adam Hendel , the founding engineer of Tembo, about their project, PGMQ, and how it came to be. We discuss the design decisions behind job queues, interfacing from Rust to Postgres, and the engineering decisions that went into building the extension.

Few developers have been as influential to my career as Niko Matsakis. Of course he is a world-class engineer with a PhD from ETH Zürich, a Rust core maintainer who has been working on the language for way more than a decade, and a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS. But more importantly, he is an empathetic human and an exceptional communicator.

Up until a few years ago, Python tooling was a nightmare: basic tasks like installing packages or managing Python versions was a pain. The tools were brittle and did not work well together, mired in a swamp of underspecified implementation defined behaviour. Then, apparently suddenly, but in reality backed by years of ongoing work on formal interoperability specifications, we saw a renaissance of...

We don't usually think much about Webhooks -- at least I don't. It's just web requests after all, right? In reality, there is a lot of complexity behind routing webhook requests through the internet. What if a webhook request gets lost? How do you know it was received in the first place? Can it be a security issue if a webhook gets handled twice? (Spoiler alert: yes) Today I sit down with Tom from...

Victor Ciura is a veteran C++ developer who worked on Visual C++ and the Clang Power Tools. In this first episode of season 4, we talk to him about large-scale Rust adoption at Microsoft. Victor works as a Principal Engineer on the Rust team in Microsoft's Developer Division, building the compiler toolchain and libraries needed for the broader Rust efforts across the organization. He is a regular...

Sit back, get a warm beverage and look back at the highlights of Season 3 with us. We've been at this for a while now (three seasons, one year, and 24 episodes to be exact). We had guests from a wide range of industries: from automotive to CAD software, and from developer tooling to systems programming. Our focus this time around was on the technical details of Rust in production, especially integ...