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Uber RTAPI Gateway

RTAPI ("Real-Time API") was Uber's mobile API gateway from 2014, extracted from the original dispatch monolith during the 2014 dispatch split. A Node.js service that routed all real-time mobile-app requests to the hundreds of backend microservices within Uber. Implemented as a single repository broken into multiple specialized deployment groups for different product lines. (Source: sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber)

Notably, the first generation of Uber Eats was completely developed within RTAPI as a fast path to product-market fit — new surfaces built inside the gateway, then extracted to proper services as they matured. This is a canonical "gateway as feature-prototype sandbox, then graduate" pattern.

Replaced in 2020 by the Edge Gateway when RTAPI showed its age — still on Node.js and JavaScript (deprecated for backend in 2018 Project Ark), with view-generation and business-logic mixed ad-hoc into the gateway code.

Primary-source reference: Uber's new gateway architecture (the primary-source link from Clemm's retrospective).

Seen in

• sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber — introduced as the 2014 split-out of the mobile-routing role from the old dispatch monolith; retired in favor of the 2020 Edge Gateway.

Related

• systems/uber-dispatch — the sibling split-out of the matching role from the old dispatch monolith.
• systems/uber-edge-gateway — the 2020 four-layer successor.
• systems/nodejs — runtime.
• companies/uber — origin org.