Case Study: Gawker achieves extreme scalability and faster development with Akka

Gawker leverages Typesafe for extreme scale

Gawker Media, publisher of high‑traffic sites like Gawker and Gizmodo (over 80 million unique monthly visitors), faced scaling and maintenance problems after seven years on PHP: a 300,000‑line codebase, split development teams in New York and Budapest, and the overhead of running both LAMP and JVM environments made development slow and inflexible. They needed a single, JVM‑compatible platform that could interoperate with existing Java code and support aggressive growth.

Gawker adopted the Typesafe Platform—primarily Scala with Play, Akka and Slick—moving production code within four months and reaching about 65,000 lines of Scala in production; by June 2013 all services ran on Play/Akka/Slick/Scala. The result is a modular, scalable system that simplifies cross‑team development, speeds onboarding, and enables a faster, more reliable development and deployment cycle, making the Typesafe Platform the default choice for new services.

Gawker

Tom Plunkett

CTO