> The Challenge
When your website goes down, every second counts. Our goal was to deliver notifications across multiple channels (SMS, email, phone calls) in under 500 milliseconds.
- Architecture Overview
Our alert system consists of:
- Event detection layer
- Routing engine
- Delivery workers
- Retry mechanism
- Performance Optimizations
Key techniques we used:
- Pre-warmed connection pools
- Parallel delivery to multiple channels
- Smart retry logic with exponential backoff
- Regional failover
- Results
We achieved:
- P50 latency: 180ms
- P99 latency: 450ms
- 99.95% delivery success rate
The system now handles over 1 million alerts per day with consistent performance.