Lessons Learned in Scaling Strava’s Infrastructure

When Strava’s user community surged, managing the performance and scale of their segment leaderboards was a technical challenge for their engineering team. They quickly realized they needed mechanisms to help them scale and manage the internal systems to handle the influx – while maintaining a high customer experience.

Engineering Manager of Infrastructure, Jacob Stultz, and Senior Platform Engineer, Jeff Pollard, of Strava share how they rely on a robust ephemeral cache in Redis to more quickly and effectively service the majority of their reads. They share lessons learned while scaling their infrastructure, how the cache fits in with the larger leaderboards architecture, and how updates to the cache are replicated from canonical storage – and what tradeoffs were made for this implementation.

Speakers:

Jacob Stultz, Engineering Manager, Infrastructure, Strava

Jeff Pollard, Senior Platform Engineer, Strava