CASE STUDIES · Last verified April 2026
Real production stories:
who uses Rust, who uses Go, and why.
No curator bias: Discord switched to Rust AND Uber stays on Go. Both are right for their workloads. Every figure linked to source.
Rust production deployments
| Company | What they built | Why Rust | Scale | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discord | Read States cache service | Go's GC was causing latency spikes every 2 minutes. Rust eliminated GC pauses entirely. | 8M concurrent Read State entries | 2020 | Source → |
| Cloudflare | Pingora proxy (replaces NGINX) | 70% less CPU, 67% less memory vs NGINX. Memory safety without GC at 1T req/day. | 1 trillion requests/day | 2022 | Source → |
| 1Password | Core vault and sync engine | Security-critical code; Rust's memory safety is mandatory for password storage. Single codebase, all platforms. | 63% of core in Rust | 2022 | Source → |
| Dropbox | Nucleus sync engine | Python sync engine had correctness issues at scale. Rust rewrite fixed reliability and improved performance. | Thousands of engineer-hours to rewrite | 2020 | Source → |
| Mozilla | Firefox internals (CSS engine, media) | Memory safety without GC for browser security. Servo project pioneered Rust-in-production. | Parts of Firefox 100M+ users | 2017 | Source → |
| Microsoft | Windows components (networking stack, kernel modules) | Secure Future Initiative: Rust adopted for safety-critical Windows components to eliminate memory safety bugs. | Expanding across Windows | 2023 | Source → |
| Linux kernel | Rust-for-Linux: kernel drivers and modules | First non-C language accepted into the Linux kernel. Memory safety for device drivers without GC overhead. | Growing: kernel 6.1 to 6.14+ | 2022 | Source → |
| Solana / Polkadot | Blockchain runtimes and programs | Memory safety + no GC pauses + WASM compilation = the only viable choice for consensus-critical financial code. | Billions in total value locked | 2019 | Source → |
Go production deployments
| Company | What they built | Why Go | Scale | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes, Docker (early), internal services | Go was created at Google. Kubernetes and Docker defined cloud-native infrastructure. | Kubernetes runs billions of containers | 2014 | Source → | |
| Uber | Geofence, dispatch, payments microservices | PGO (profile-guided optimisation) saved 24,000 CPU cores across Go fleet. Goroutines handle millions of req/sec. | 24,000 CPU cores saved via PGO | 2015 | Source → |
| Twitch | Chat infrastructure | Go's goroutine model handles millions of simultaneous chat rooms. No language change needed at 10B+ msg/day. | 10B+ messages/day, 2M+ concurrent streams | 2016 | Source → |
| Cockroach Labs | CockroachDB distributed SQL | Go enables a team to build a distributed database without C++. Performance is competitive for SQL workloads. | 90% of CockroachDB codebase | 2015 | Source → |
| HashiCorp | Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad | Go's easy distribution (single binary), goroutine model for agent communication, and fast compile for development. | Terraform: millions of daily active users | 2013 | Source → |
| DigitalOcean | Core infrastructure services | Go's concurrency model and simple deployment story fit infrastructure tooling. Goroutines for concurrent provisioning. | Platform serves 600k+ customers | 2016 | Source → |