Here’s a post about experiences at Microsoft with writing Krustlet in Rust.
Our team, DeisLabs, recently released a new piece of software called Krustlet, which is a tool for running WebAssembly modules on the popular, open-source container management tool called Kubernetes. Kubernetes is used quite extensively to run cloud software across many vendors and companies and is primarily written in the Go programming language. While there have been many stories about using Rust for systems level programming, you don’t often hear stories about cloud software or Kubernetes software being written in Rust. So, we wanted to explain why we made the choice we did.
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The other reason we chose Rust was its strong safety and security guarantees. Like most Rust newbies, we started off cursing Rust’s borrow checker (which statically enforces many of Rust’s safety guarantees) and sometimes fighting with it for hours. But after we started to get a better understanding of how to code things, we realized how many bugs and problems the compiler was saving us from. It kept us from exposing possible null pointers, thread safety issues, and other overlooked bugs. The whole learning process took us roughly a month. For the first week or so, we lost much of our time to learning how borrows worked. After about 2 weeks, we were back up to 50% efficiency compared to us writing in Go. After a month, we all were comfortable enough that we were back up to full efficiency (in terms of how much code we could write). However, we noticed that we gained productivity in the sense that we didn’t spend as much time manually checking specific conditions, like null pointers, or not having to debug as many problems (I’ll cover that some more below). Occasionally, we run into a more complex case that takes us longer to figure out than it would with other languages. However, this occurs with diminishing frequency as time goes on and we continue to gain experience.
https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/04/29/the-safety-boat-kubernetes-and-rust/