Case Study: Discord achieves reliable, scalable, easy-to-operate systems with ScyllaDB

Discord on the Joy of Opinionated Systems

Discord, the gaming-focused voice and text chat platform that grew to over 250 million registered users (about 14 million daily users sending ~300 million messages per day), faced intense scalability and uptime demands as its user base exploded. To power its Activity Tab and other high-throughput services, Discord adopted ScyllaDB as its data store.

ScyllaDB delivered an opinionated, auto‑configured solution with prebuilt monitoring (Prometheus and Grafana images and dashboards) that made setup and operations straightforward. That predictability let Discord run clusters reliably, enabled ScyllaDB to quickly pinpoint a capacity-related production incident and simply expand the cluster, and — according to Discord — saved the company time, money, and downtime.

Discord

Mark Smith

Director of Engineering