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Container Architecture

The deployable units inside one colo, the technology of each, and the store it owns.

Editable source SVG draw.io All views
LinkedIn · one serving colo (every colo runs the same stack) Online tier · Rest.li mid-tier Edge and API Traffic tier ATS · colo pinning API layer GraphQL · Java Identity Rest.li Member services Profile Rest.li Social graph Rest.li Messaging Play · Akka · SSE Jobs Rest.li Discovery services Content Rest.li Feed broker second-pass rank Search broker federated Notifications ATC on Samza Data tier Systems of record MySQL sharded Espresso MySQL · Helix Ambry blobs Derived serving FollowFeed actor timelines Venice derived KV LIquid graph Galene search index Couchbase cache Streams Brooklin CDC Kafka local + aggregate Samza nearline Azure Front Door global edge APNs / FCM Offline platform HDFS · Spark HTTPS session pull Rest.li write change log push LinkedIn — Container Architecture (one colo) Interface / broker Security / platform Application we own Data store Queue / topic External / third party synchronous event / async Edges are representative, not exhaustive; every service talks Rest.li over D2 inside the colo. v 1.0 · owner Platform Engineering · date 2026-09

Decisions

  • Every colo runs the full stack, so a member is served end to end inside one colo
  • Mid-tier services are Java on Rest.li, with D2 balancing load on the client side. No central load balancer sits between services
  • Messaging delivery runs on Play and Akka, holding persistent SSE connections, because holding connections scales differently from serving requests

Published numbers

  • Couchbase: 10M+ queries a second across 300+ clusters (LinkedIn, 2018)
  • Brooklin: 2T+ messages a day (LinkedIn, 2019)
  • LIquid: 2M queries a second at 99.99% availability (LinkedIn, 2023)

Deliberately omitted

  • Hundreds of smaller services; the edges drawn are representative
  • Offline grid internals: view 11
  • Failure domains and colo count: view 22
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · LinkedIn's own stack in LinkedIn-run colos · Enterprise Architecture · 2026-0908-container-architecture