This year Allegro.pl turns 21. The company, while serving millions of Poles in their online shopping, has taken part in many technological advances. Breaking the monolith, utilising public cloud offerings, machine learning, you name it. Even though many technologies we use might seem as just following the hype, their adoption is backed by solid reasoning. Let me tell you the story of a project I’ve had the privilege of working on.

In our services ecosystem it’s usually the case that services can handle a limited amount of requests per second. We show how we introduced a new algorithm for our publish-subscribe queue system. The road to production deployment highlights some key distributed systems’ takeaways we’d like to discuss.