Case Study: Storyblocks achieves reduced technical debt and a modern event-driven data pipeline with Confluent

Storyblocks Partners with Confluent to Redesign Its Data Pipeline and Slash Technical Debt

Storyblocks, a fast-growing stock media provider, faced scaling and agility problems as it moved from a monolithic app to microservices — synchronous REST APIs and an AWS Kinesis pipeline weren’t delivering the data collection, event-driven communication, and discoverability it needed. To address this, Storyblocks adopted Confluent Cloud (Confluent’s fully managed Kafka service) to create a centralized event bus for streaming data and inter-service communication.

Confluent implemented a Confluent-backed event pipeline (about 200 topics) with infinite retention and replayable events, replacing brittle point-to-point APIs and an inadequate Kinesis setup. As a result, Storyblocks drastically cut technical debt and TCO, supported its rebranding and consolidated audio/video search, improved data visibility for engineers and data scientists, and sped bug fixes (a billing bug affecting ~5,000 users was resolved via a unit test and event replay in days versus the prior weeklong database fixes). Confluent remains the central pillar of Storyblocks’ data infrastructure.

Storyblocks

Charles DeVeas

Director of Engineering