We built a high-scale caching service with rigorous latency, cost, and availability requirements in Kotlin. Then, we rewrote our services in Rust. Was it worth it?

This talk takes you through our journey - from initially getting carried away in the excitement of what Rust could mean, lessons we learned along the way, and how I would assess the decision in retrospect. Find out how we navigated the development process with a team comprised of varying levels of Rust expertise from novices to experts, alongside an incredible - booming but still nascent - Rust community. I'll share our mistakes - like how one can write slow code in Rust too - and our benchmarking methodology. The journey will include lessons learned along the way on identifying bottlenecks and iterating on your code base. Whether you are evaluating rust or have already started your Rust journey, the lessons in this talk may help you identify the dimensions to evaluate rust and accelerate your optimization journey.