Events like the World Cup bring together a huge number of fans like Alex all over the world. The biggest challenge in maintaining such a service is scale. The type of traffic for such events can be extremely spiky. A very steady traffic volume can suddenly spike when Mbappe scores the goal that ties the game. Suddenly, FCM needs to notify 250M users about this event. By Michelangelo Mecozzi.
To prepare for an event of this size, Firebase Messaging implemented several changes and best practices that we want to share with the rest of the engineering community. Hopefully, lessons learned here will help you prepare your infrastructure for the next big event. The article then delve into:
- Understanding the traffic
- Using the past to predict the future
- Capacity planning
- Load balancing
- Defense in depth
- Cluster scaling
- Load tests
Managing high spikes in traffic is certainly no easy task. But equipped with the right best practices and the most effective mitigation strategies, you will be in the best position to handle large traffic volumes. Very interesting!
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