This month I want to highlight an article, How Discord Stores Billions of Messages by Stanislav Vishnevskiy. This article ventures beyond the standard considerations in a tech scalability article by including explicit requirements around business needs and operational sustainability. This article reminds us that we are best served when our tech decisions account for broader context than simply scaling to meet predicted demand.

https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages

“Next we defined our requirements:

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• Automatic failover — We love sleeping at night and build Discord to self heal as much as possible.
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• Proven to work — We love trying out new technology, but not too new.
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• Open source — We believe in controlling our own destiny and don’t want to depend on a third party company.”