Lyft's Journey Through Mobile Networking
Article Summary
Michael Rebello from Lyft reveals how they scaled from hand-written APIs to a unified networking architecture serving 500+ endpoints. The journey involved killing technical debt, slashing payload sizes by 50%, and bringing server-side proxy tech to mobile.
As Lyft's mobile team grew 15x in 5 years, their networking infrastructure had to evolve dramatically. This post chronicles their progression from inconsistent hand-coded APIs through YAML generation to a protocol buffers-based IDL system, and ultimately to integrating Envoy Mobile as part of their service mesh.
Key Takeaways
- Protocol buffers became single source of truth, generating consistent APIs across iOS, Android, and server
- Content negotiation with protobuf binary format cut response sizes by over 50% on large endpoints
- Custom code generators created Rx-based interfaces that abstracted transport layer implementation details
- Envoy Mobile integration treats mobile clients as mesh nodes, enabling shared functionality with backend services
- IDL abstraction allowed transport improvements without any product code changes
Lyft transformed mobile networking from error-prone manual implementations to an automated, protocol buffers-based system that improved performance while making mobile clients first-class citizens in their service mesh.
