The Incredible Engineering That Saved Slack During COVID

Video Description

How Slack went from thousands to 2.3 MILLION database queries per second - without crashing once. When COVID hit in March 2020, the entire world went remote overnight. For Slack, this meant their database traffic exploded by 50% in just ONE WEEK with zero warning. This is the untold engineering story of how they survived the biggest stress test in tech history. In this video, we dive deep into: - Slack's original LAMP stack architecture and why it worked (until it didn't) - The 3-database system that powered millions of workspaces - Why mega-corporations with 350,000+ employees broke their infrastructure - YouTube's Vitess solution - the open-source database proxy that saved them - The genius of horizontal scaling WHILE users are actively using the system - How they migrated 45% of their tables in a live production environment - The timeline from 2016-2020 that accidentally prepared them for the pandemic Article Link: https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-vitess/ --- MY 12K+ DISCORD 💬 https://discord.gg/GkrFX4zT2C CONNECT WITH ME ON SOCIAL 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/lewismenelaws 🎚TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lewismenelaws 🐣 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LewisMenelaws My gear 💻 https://liinks.co/lewismenelaws --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:26 How Slack Became So Popular 1:25 Slack Started as a LAMP App 2:27 How Slack Organized it's Data 4:12 How Their Infrastructure Slowed Them Down 5:36 The Breaking Point 6:19 The Options They Presented 7:28 Option 3... 7:37 Why YouTube Created Vitess 9:35 The Vitess Prototype 11:29 The Migration 13:05 The Rise of COVID 16:00 Vitess to the Rescue 17:09 Reflecting on Scale 18:10 Become a Channel Member!