Tom Elliott joined Yext in 2015 as an iOS developer. Within a year, both his mobile projects were canceled.

But Tom's career crisis was nothing compared to what was happening with Yext's infrastructure. 

The company was hitting the limits of homegrown tools built by ex-Google engineers who had recreated their own version of Borg called Khan. It worked when Yext was small. Now they were running thousands of microservices—Tom calculated they had a higher microservice-to-employee ratio than Uber.

The real breaking point? Server upgrades. Every time the infrastructure team needed to upgrade a machine, they had to manually edit code to move services off, do the upgrade, then edit code again to move everything back.

"Everything was manually configured as to where things lay," Tom recalls.

Khan had been built by "one or two people" as a coalition of the willing.

Now Yext had grown past 20 teams, and adding the features they desperately needed—like automatic workload migration—would require massive investment in a homegrown system.

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