Scaling wix with microservices and multi cloud - 2015

Many small startups build their systems on top of a traditional toolset like Tomcat, Hibernate, and MySQL. These systems are used because they facilitate easy development and fast progress, but many of them are monolithic and have limited scalability. So as a startup grows, the team is confronted with the problem of how to evolve the system and make it scalable. Facing the same dilemma, Wix.com grew from 0 to 70 million users in just a few years. Facing some interesting challenges, like performance and availability. Traditional performance solutions, such as caching, would not help due to a very long tail problem which causes caching to be highly inefficient. And because every minute of downtime means customers lose money, the product needed to have near 100% availability. Solving these issues required some interesting and out-of-the-box thinking, and this talk will discuss some of these strategies: building a highly preformant, highly available and highly scalable system; and leveraging microservices architecture and multi-cloud platforms to help build a very efficient and cost-effective system.