Cultured code: Server backend from Things now also in Swift

Apple’s programming language Swiftin which numerous iPhone, Mac and increasingly also Windows apps are developed, is also suitable for server mode. The makers behind the popular task manager Things From the German developer Cultured Code, this has now demonstrated for their own application: has been running since spring The backend of the Things Cloud on it.

All Apple platforms addressed

The synchronization service ensures that the data from things are distributed between the supported devices-these are currently almost all Apple platforms, i.e. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro. The backend originally ran with Python 2 on Google’s app Engine. That was stable, but restrictions were quickly felt, writes Cultured Code. This included a high memory requirement that drove the infrastructure costs upwards, relatively slow response times and the problematic Static Typing in Python 2, which complicated memory processes.

In addition, the makers had to develop and maintain their own C-based service for their push notification system. Due to all these difficulties and the fact that various displacements from libraries used, the Things makers finally opted for a complete Rewrite from Things Cloud. Like Things himself, this should be done in Swift after other development environments such as Java, GO, C ++ or a jump to Python 3 are excluded. It was also positive, writes Cultured Code, that Swift compiled “in Linux in a long time” and has been one for almost ten years Swift-server workgroup gives. Cultured Code continued to use the Swift-on-a-server package Vapor as well as the Swiftnio library.

Three times cheaper, four times faster

The end result is that the Things Cloud runs on AWS with terraform and Kubernetes. Contents of Things land on the Swift server via haprxy, mail content via Lambda us SQS. Redisttack, MySQLKIT, SOTO (towards S3) and Apple’s APNSWIFT (for notifications) are used to play and save data.

As a result, both the compute costs and the response times were reduced: the Swift architecture should be three times cheaper, with a four times lower response time. More details on the switch from Things Cloud to Swift has Cultured Code in one Presentation from the serverside.wift conference summarized.