
Apart from limiting operational agility, this architecture made it more likely that certain problems would have a large blast radius and cause a major impact, such as system-wide service disruptions. “We wanted to move to an operationally reliable and cost-efficient solution that offered a low-latency experience for our customers.”įirst developed in 2011, Snapchat was built as part of a monolithic architecture where the majority of the Snapchat features were served from a single service application. “As the number of Snapchatters grew to hundreds of millions, we did some technical diligence and found that Amazon DynamoDB was the right technology choice for us,” says Saral Jain, director of engineering and the head of infrastructure at Snap. Snap modernized Snapchat’s architecture using microservices built around services like Amazon DynamoDB, a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. Snap was born in the cloud, and as part of its evolution to provide a compelling experience for hundreds of millions of users, Snap made the move to a service-oriented, regionalized, cost-efficient, durable architecture by using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Every day, over 290 million Snapchatters on average use the app, sending billions of pictures and video messages called “Snaps.” Before Snapchat could reach this scale, however, it needed to modernize its legacy monolithic infrastructure.

(Snap) creates Snapchat, an app that offers its community around the world a fast and fun way to connect with close friends.
