February 28, 2023
4 min read
I’m Shailesh Kumar, ClickUp’s SVP of engineering, leading our company’s efforts to rearchitect our infrastructure for reliability and performance. Over the past several months, I’ve shared updates on our platform journey, and now I’m excited to tell you that ClickUp 3.0 is here!
Today, at our LevelUp conference (check it out live or on-demand here!), we officially introduced this latest version of ClickUp. In addition to adding dozens of exciting new features — from AI to Universal Search — we’ve rebuilt our database and shifted to a service-based architecture to make ClickUp more scalable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant.
You said that performance enhancements were important to you and I’m happy to say we’ve delivered these in the core areas of the platform, with more to come. Redesigning ClickUp’s architecture has been my focus since I joined the company more than a year ago, and the enhancements we’ve put in place have prepared us to move forward with confidence.
Throughout this process, we’ve been laser-focused on ensuring the highest levels of uptime, a top-notch user experience, and snappier performance.
But how? To start, we hired more than 150 engineers over the past year and a half to help rethink our infrastructure from the ground up. We’ve focused the efforts of this talented team across three core initiatives:
We Completely Rearchitected Our Database
Our database is where our customer data sits. Given the pace of our growth, this has been a bottleneck for us. Therefore, it was important that we re-architect our database before reaching the upper limits of our current architecture.
To do this, we’ve begun to shard our database. Think of it like a library where instead of having one giant section where all the books are stored, there are many different sections so you can go straight to the appropriate section and find the book you’re looking for more quickly and efficiently.
Our new database architecture will enable us to scale infinitely while ensuring the highest levels of speed and stability.
We Shifted to a Service-Based Architecture
A service-based architecture is essentially a way of organizing different parts of our application so t hat each part, or “service”, is responsible for a specific function.
You can compare it to a factory, where each worker is responsible for a specific task and performs it independently of others. These workers collaborate to create a finished product, but any of them can be replaced, perhaps with a faster and more efficient worker, without interrupting the production process.
By moving to a service-based architecture, ClickUp is more scalable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant.
We Rewrote Our WebSockets and Application Code
You need to see your latest data in ClickUp without refreshing your browser. To make this possible, we completely rewrote our WebSocket infrastructure and our application code so that our UI can seamlessly load real-time data. Simply said, the days of having to refresh your browser to see your latest data are over.