Duolingo's Engineering Challenge: Sending 4 Million Notifications During the Super Bowl
Delivering Millions of Notifications within Seconds During the Super Bowl 🔗
During the Super Bowl, Duolingo faced the challenge of sending 4 million notifications in just 5 seconds in conjunction with a new advertisement. Initially skeptical about the feasibility, the engineering team ultimately developed a robust system to handle this task. The project involved careful planning, managing changing requirements, and building an asynchronous notification system on AWS. Key challenges included achieving the necessary speed and scale, ensuring timely delivery, and maintaining system resilience to avoid overwhelming their servers. Extensive testing was conducted, both with silent notifications and real user interactions, leading to a successful campaign where 99% of notifications were sent within 5.7 seconds of the ad airing.
What was the primary goal of Duolingo's engineering team during the Super Bowl?
The main objective was to send 4 million notifications within 5 seconds to coincide with their Super Bowl advertisement.
How did Duolingo ensure that their notification system could handle the high volume of messages?
They built an asynchronous system using AWS services, focusing on speed, scale, and resilient design, while also conducting extensive testing to identify and fix bottlenecks.
What challenges did Duolingo encounter while preparing for the Super Bowl?
Challenges included rapidly changing requirements from the marketing team, ensuring that the notification system could scale effectively, and preventing the system from becoming overwhelmed by user requests.