Processing millions of events in real-time is one of the most challenging problems in modern SaaS architecture. In this post, we share our approach.

The Challenge

When we first launched, our analytics pipeline could handle about 1,000 events per second. As we scaled to 10,000+ users, we needed to rethink our entire architecture.

The key insight was that not all analytics need to be real-time. By categorizing events into tiers, we could optimize each path independently.

Our Solution

We built a three-tier processing pipeline: hot path for real-time dashboards, warm path for hourly aggregations, and cold path for historical analysis.