How Discord Stores TRILLIONS of Messages

Have you ever wondered how Discord is able to store trillions of user messages without breaking a sweat? In this video, we'll take a deep dive into the technologies and strategies that Discord's software engineers use to manage such a massive amount of data.

Discord is one of the most popular communication apps in the world, with over 250 million users and counting. With such a large user base, Discord's servers receive an enormous amount of messages every day. To store all these messages, Discord employs a distributed database system that runs on hundreds of servers worldwide.

This system uses a variety of modern database technologies, including Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch and most recently: ScyllaDB to ensure that messages are stored reliably and efficiently. These databases are designed to handle huge amounts of data and provide fast read and write capabilities, making it possible for Discord to scale to millions of users without compromising performance.

So if you've ever wondered how your messages are stored on Discord, or if you're just curious about how modern database technology works, this video is a must-watch. Join us as we explore the world of distributed databases and learn how Discord's software engineers keep trillions of messages organized and accessible for millions of users around the world.

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TIMESTAMPS ⏰

0:00 Intro
0:38 The BackStory
1:46 Cassandra Troubles
4:09 Change Architectures
6:28 Data Services
8:57 The BIG Migration
10:35 Where It's at now
11:40 What we can learn from this
12:46 Thanks for watching and subscribe :)

[CodingWithLewis]

Thanks for watching this video :) What company would you like me to cover next?

[jamoncitovideos]

This types of videos are great. It's not common to face scenarios that have this massive scale and it's great to get to know how they have been handled before by other engineers

[puspamadak]

The engineering was truly awesome. Have to salute the engineers as well as SyllaDB team for such a great product.

[sorteslyngelk]

How the hell is discord even making money. That infrastructure sounds pretty expensive...

[smf]

Nice! I love databases and learning more about them, great video.

[cocoiyeah]

Kudos to the ScyllaDB team! I've been a fan of their product since 2019, and in my opinion, it's better than Apache Cassandra. However, their open-source license limits usage to only five nodes.

[peckychicken]

Wow discord are really committed to keeping their app up to date

[futureplot]

Your channel needs to be more popular. This content is the only thing that motivates me to write some code after running into an error.

[joshburger]

as a dev, just thinking about a migration of that scale is anxiety inducing

[ryanzspaulding]

I like your funny words magic man.
Definitely didn’t understand about 95% of this video but it was really fascinating and well presented

[ryojikn]

This is amazing, please keep going.

Such an amazing source of knowledge and inspiration in a perfect method for better engineers

[NaviYT]

I was today years old when I learned that Lewis makes long form content.

[smixqse]

i love the way the subtitles interpreted scylladb: s db, mes db, solid b, sillydb, facilitydb, silladb, sil a db

[staticobjx]

Hi Lewis, I discovered your channel thru YT Shorts, but I like this format a little better, not only it dives into architectural problems and solutions, in my opinion it is not rushed. Also, awesome graphics! Thanks a lot and more power to your channel.

[vaggelis_best]

11:24 Poor Descord engineers😢
They are stressing even HARD

[joker-wrpt]

Sir you're my inspiration these types are useful please bring more like this like how big system works so that we can have real-time understanding

[weiSane]

I'm waiting for the day discord switches to vector databases when they have to store zetabytes of messages 😂

[MultiSciGeek]

This is better than ASMR. Fell asleep in 8 minutes!

[defnt]

Very cool format and interesting stories!
I wish Discord to find frontend devs as good as their backend team <3

[nerduser]

The type of content I love to watch thank you lewis!
Had this question for Reddit how reddit saved and would love to know how discord works