Counting Billions of Content Usage at Canva

Canva faced significant challenges in accurately counting content usage for their Creators Program due to the rapidly growing data volume which was originally handled by a MySQL-based system. The MySQL design, while simple, created scalability issues. Canva explored transitioning to DynamoDB but found it wouldn't solve their processing problems. Ultimately, they moved to an OLAP-based solution with Snowflake, significantly improving latency and handling billions of records efficiently. The new architecture provided numerous benefits including reduced latency, simplified incident handling, and decreased data storage needs, though it also introduced some new complexities in data transformation and infrastructure management.