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Unified Grid: How we re-architected Slack for our largest customers

All software is built atop a core set of assumptions. As new code is added and new use-cases emerge, software can become unmoored from those assumptions. When this happens, a fundamental tension arises between revisiting those foundational assumptions—which usually entails a lot of work—or trying to support new behavior atop the existing architecture. The latter …

Simultaneously, we’ve built ways for Slack clients to share data across multiple workspaces on the same Grid, such as the Threads and Unreads views and cross-workspace channels. Therefore, rather than start by tackling what were potentially thousands of broken APIs, we decided to build a proof of concept to better understand the benefits of Unified Grid and the work that would be required to ship it end-to-end. If an API did not rely on workspace context for routing—perhaps because it had been migrated to a new sharding scheme during the Vitess migration—we allowed it to be called in Unified Grid and confirmed that the query still behaved correctly.

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