In the monolithic applications SpaceX used at the time, some applications were on a homegrown JavaScript framework and other applications started moving to KnockoutJS.  “In 2014, we started building a new architecture. Fun fact, our old solution was called DS9, and this new approach was called TNG, because our team loved Star Trek,” says Madonia with a laugh. The team began using AngularJS and considering the idea of microservices.

“One problem with a monolith is that you have to deploy all of the pieces together. If something was broken in our shop floor system, but we had big changes that we wanted to release in the inventory system, we had to wait to deploy the changes,” says Madonia. “We were on a weekly release cadence and we needed to move faster.” In order to do that, the team focused on changing operations in order to minimize maintenance of older applications.