Over the past few years, Wix has experienced tremendous growth in both scale and complexity. From a WYSIWYG visual website editor to a complete ecosystem of features that empowers self-creators and design agencies to create professional websites, and allows anyone from individuals to large enterprises to manage their online presence…

Debugging microservices’ event driven communication is not trivial, especially when it’s based on event streaming platforms like Apache Kafka. While scale grows more easily and the distributed system becomes more decoupled and resilient, the operational aspects become much harder. How do you understand why your service’s database has some incorrect…

Event driven architecture is very powerful and well suited for a distributed microservices environment. By introducing a broker intermediary, event driven architecture offers a decoupled architecture, easier scalability, and a much higher degree of resiliency. But it’s much harder to set up correctly as opposed to request-reply client-server type architecture. …

In 2021, my team worked on migrating Wix’s 2000 microservices from self-hosted Kafka clusters to a multi-cluster Managed cloud platform (Confluent Cloud) in a seamless way that did not need to involve the owners of these services. The migration was done during regular traffic without any downtime. This was the…

Choosing which database to use is one of the most important decisions you can make when working on a new microservice. If you realize down the line that you’ve made the wrong choice, migrating to another database is a very costly and risky procedure. Each database technology (and type) has…

Unlike with UI frameworks, or software industry buzzwords, data storage technologies, i.e. databases are famously slow to change, and new innovation takes longer to be adopted. For a large organization, switching to a different OLTP database as your main workhorse happens very rarely. In recent years, with the advent of…

Fibers are the backbone of the highly performant, asynchronous and concurrent abilities of ZIO. They are lightweight “green threads” implemented by the ZIO runtime system. Forking any IO[E, A] effect means it will immediately run on a new fiber. The ZIO documentation recommends that non-advanced programmers avoid fibers and instead…

Wix’s distributed system of 2000 clustered microservices is required to process billions of business events every day with very high speed in a highly concurrent fashion. There is a need to balance the load between the various cluster nodes, such that no bottlenecks are created. …

Wix has a huge scale of traffic. more than 500 billion HTTP requests and more than 1.5 billion Kafka business events per day. Caching the responses and events is critical for having the best performance and resilience for Wix’s 1500 microservices. As traffic to your service grows, customers can face…