How We Created a High-Scale Notification System at Duolingo That Delivered Millions of Messages Within Seconds During a Super Bowl Commercial Break

QCon London 2024

Session platforms

How We Created a High-Scale Notification System at Duolingo That Delivered Millions of Messages Within Seconds During a Super Bowl Commercial Break

Monday Apr 8 / 02:45PM BST, Fleming (3rd Fl.)

Abstract

Building a notification system may seem trivial, but what about building one that could reach million of users within a few seconds? What about doing that right after your advertisement airs?

Event-based notification systems are not uncommon anymore, but there’s rarely a cost-effective example of an on-demand, highly parallel notification system. The complexity of building such a system comes from the intersection of system design, site reliability, and cloud resource management. All of that while being pressured by the demands of an unhinged marketing campaign over TV and the Web.

In this presentation, we will focus on:

  • How we built/test a robust on-demand notification system
  • What it takes to manage cloud resources/site-reliability at the same time.
  • How to mitigate reliability issues with “zombie mode" and other relevant internal tooling we created.

Topics

platforms Platform Engineering architecture scalability Reliability Asynchronous System Design Notification System Cloud Resource Management python
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2024 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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