Why Discord Keeps Rewriting Its Stack

Discord rewrote their stack multiple times. Not because they got it wrong. Because they got too big for what they built. 2013 — The starting stack Elixir for real-time messaging. Python for APIs. Go for microservices. MongoDB for storage. Electron for desktop. Standard startup choices. Ship fast, figure out the rest later. 2017 — MongoDB had to go 5 million users. MongoDB couldn't keep up. Switched to Cassandra . 12 nodes. Worked fine. Until 2022, when those 12 nodes became 177. Maintenance got