Failing to abstract region-based storage early cost Canva a monumental re-architecture
Brendan Humphreys · Inside a $3B ARR Rocketship — Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys on Deploying AI at Scale · Jun 20, 2025 · at 47:35
Brendan Humphreys, Head of Engineering at Canva, reflects on architectural debt and retrofitting multi-region storage infrastructure as Canva scaled to hundreds of engineering teams.
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“Very early in Canva's architectural journey, we put a quite good abstraction in over our AWS infrastructure, but I do think back now and wonder, oof, we could have just spent a little bit more time Really abstraction, abstracting region-based storage. It would have been cheap to do then. We have got it now, but it was a massive engineering effort. You know, back when it was 10 of us and a few services and a few databases it would have been relatively cheap to kind of build that culture in there, build that kind of tax, if you like, on every product that you have to think about what region shard You'gonna store the data in. Having to retrofit it across hundreds of teams hundreds of services was a monumental lift.”
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