Reliable Messaging to Millions of Users with MigratoryData

TL;DR

This paper presents MigratoryData, a scalable and reliable web-based notification service capable of handling millions of users with guarantees on message ordering and delivery, even during failures.

Contribution

It introduces the architecture and design of MigratoryData, demonstrating its scalability and fault tolerance for large-scale pub/sub notification services.

Findings

Handles millions of concurrent connections

Maintains reliability despite server failures

Supports low-latency live updates

Abstract

Web-based notification services are used by a large range of businesses to selectively distribute live updates to customers, following the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) model. Typical deployments can involve millions of subscribers expecting ordering and delivery guarantees together with low latencies. Notification services must be vertically and horizontally scalable, and adopt replication to provide a reliable service. We report our experience building and operating MigratoryData, a highly-scalable notification service. We discuss the typical requirements of MigratoryData customers, and describe the architecture and design of the service, focusing on scalability and fault tolerance. Our evaluation demonstrates the ability of MigratoryData to handle millions of concurrent connections and support a reliable notification service despite server failures and network disconnections.