Building for rapid scale: A deep dive into the New York Times' messaging platform

The New York Times sends nearly 4 billion emails per year and push notifications to 50 million devices. Recently, the messaging team replatformed the entire service that supports emails and push notifications. Katerina Iliakopoulou shares the journey from retiring the legacy systems used for sending emails and push notifications at the Times to a new, stable, and highly scalable platform.

The New York Times sends nearly 4 billion emails per year to its customers, ranging from daily newsletters to transactional emails. When it comes to push notifications, the New York Times sends news alerts to approximately 50 million devices that are subscribed to receive them. This is all possible thanks to the New York Times’ new messaging platform, which in the last couple years has been fully developed in Golang and runs on Google Cloud App Engine. The new platform is comprised of a suite of microservices that are each responsible for a specific function, which include keeping track of a user’s newsletter subscriptions and metadata, quickly selecting an audience for a newsletter when sending, providing an admin UI for assembling email content and scheduling newsletter dispatches, compiling and sending an individualized email for each recipient, collecting and aggregating data about the emails sent and user behavior, and providing convenient consumer APIs for other teams to send transactional emails and access business-critical data. Katerina Iliakopoulou takes a deep dive into the journey from retiring the legacy systems used for sending emails and push notifications at the New York Times to a new, stable, and highly scalable platform. Katerina explores the architecture behind the new messaging system, the business requirements that influenced it, and the key decisions that allowed delivery times to drop from hours to a few minutes.