Wix operates websites in the long tale. As a HTML5 based WYSIWYG web publishing platform, they have created over 54 million websites, most of which receive under 100 page views per day. So traditional caching strategies don’t apply, yet it only takes four web servers to handle all the traffic. That takes some smart work.

Aviran Mordo, Head of Back-End Engineering at Wix, has described their solution in an excellent talk: Wix Architecture at Scale. What they’ve developed is in the best tradition of scaling is specialization. They’ve carefully analyzed their system and figured out how to meet their aggressive high availability and high performance goals in some most interesting ways.

Wix uses multiple datacenters and clouds. Something I haven’t seen before is that they replicate data to multiple datacenters, to Google Compute Engine, and to Amazon. And they have fallback strategies between them in case of failure.

Wix doesn’t use transactions. Instead, all data is immutable and they use a simple eventual consistency strategy that perfectly matches their use case.

Wix doesn’t cache (as in a big caching layer). Instead, they pay great attention to optimizing the rendering path so that every page displays in under 100ms.

Wix started small, with a monolithic architecture, and has consciously moved to a service architecture using a very deliberate process for identifying services that can help anyone thinking about the same move.

This is not your traditional LAMP stack or native cloud anything. Wix is a little different and there’s something here you can learn from. Let’s see how they do it...

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