Event Driven CDN Caching

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2021-08-18 17:00:08

Here at Mutiny, we are building a no-code conversion platform that enables companies to personalize their customer journey and close more revenue. Fast data delivery is a critical part of our product and is at the core of engineering at Mutiny. We make real-time decisions about what a user should see on customer websites and need an API to serve this information reliably — we call this service "user data". Today, our user data service handles up to 100M requests per month and is rapidly growing as we acquire new customers.

Let's look at an example of this in action. Imagine a Mutiny customer deployed a banner on their homepage to promote a set of new premium features to paying customers who have not yet upgraded. When a user clicks through this banner and switches to the premium plan, our events API processes this information. Now when the user returns to the homepage just a few clicks later, Mutiny must return the latest data about the user and hide the banner as the user no longer fits the criteria for the experience.

In traditional web applications, this API would be served directly by web servers that can pull the most up to date information from the database. This approach lends itself to the real-time nature of our system, where data changes in response to user actions or customer configuration changes such as adding a new data source or deploying a new experience. However, we serve these requests on public websites where traffic is globally distributed at a much higher scale and consistently fetching from our web servers would be costly and lack performance. As a result, we use a CDN in front of our user data service to maintain delivery speeds as our product continues to scale.