How We Migrated the Heart of Our Platform to Rust
Security Boulevard, Monday, June 1st, 2026
Rewriting legacy software in Rust has been a trend in recent years. So much that it did not only spawn numerous rewrites but also its own meme. When we decided to migrate our secret detection engine to Rust, one of our main goals was performance: Our Python implementation was fast, but given that we scan hundreds of gigabytes on a daily basis, even small improvements can massively reduce our costs.
We set out on this journey with an audacious goal: Rewrite the engine from scratch and have nobody notice it. In retrospect, the decision to avoid breaking changes as much as possible ended up causing most of our headaches during the migration. The plan was to change the plane's engine, mid-flight, with all business class passengers on board.