# PubNub with Stephen Blum

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/rustacean-station/pubnub-with-stephen-blum
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/rustacean-station/pubnub-with-stephen-blum.md
Podcast: [Rustacean Station](https://stenobird.com/podcast/rustacean-station)
Published: 2024-10-13T07:17:00+00:00
Episode link: https://rustacean-station.org/episode/stephen-blum/
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/audio.rustacean-station.org/file/rustacean-station/2024-10-13-stephen-blum.mp3
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/rustacean-station/episodes/pubnub-with-stephen-blum
Duration seconds: 1968

## Resource

PubNub CTO Stephen Blum discusses the strategic migration from C to Rust to handle massive-scale real-time messaging. The conversation explores the trade-offs between performance, memory safety, and the engineering challenges of managing billions of connected devices.

## Highlights
- Main idea: PubNub is migrating its core infrastructure from C to Rust to improve developer velocity and memory safety without sacrificing performance
- Practical takeaway: Using Rust allows for a safer concurrency model, which is critical when managing a pub/sub network handling trillions of monthly messages
- Failure mode: Relying on Go for high-scale infrastructure can lead to higher costs due to lower price-per-dollar performance compared to Rust or C
- Engineering strategy: The team is opting for full microservice rewrites in Rust rather than incremental C-to-Rust library ports to simplify the codebase
- Security focus: Implementing tools like cargo-vet and cargo-audit into Docker builds is essential for maintaining trust in a large-scale data pipeline

## Topics

Rust programming language, Pub/Sub architecture, Cloud infrastructure, Microservices, Kubernetes, Real-time communication, Memory safety, Software migration

## Chapters
- 1:00 — The Scale of PubNub: An overview of PubNub's infrastructure, handling three trillion JSON messages per month across billions of devices like cars and gaming consoles.
- 6:05 — The Case for Rust: Why memory safety and concurrency are non-negotiable for modern large-scale connected device networks.
- 8:35 — Rust vs. Go at Scale: A comparison of language efficiency, focusing on the need for high performance-per-dollar in massive cloud deployments.
- 15:50 — Kubernetes and Global Deployment: How PubNub uses Kubernetes and Amazon's data centers to achieve automatic scaling and regional fault tolerance.
- 23:20 — The Migration Strategy: Discussing the decision to perform full microservice rewrites rather than incremental piece-by-piece migrations.
- 30:25 — Securing the Supply Chain: Integrating cargo-vet and cargo-audit into the build pipeline to ensure crate security and prevent data leakage.

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## Transcript

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