Scale Millions of Users with Strapi

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What?

We built an Instagram Reel-like application with like/share/comment features serving millions of users in less than 6 months using Strapi. Here’s our journey and challenges.

Why Strapi?

Strapi is a headless CMS with an intuitive UI and simple setup. It provides everything needed out-of-the-box:

  • HTTP Server
  • Authentication & Authorization
  • Role-based permissions
  • Database Management
  • Migrations
  • REST API

Architecture

Our architecture splits into two parts:

  1. A CMS (Strapi)
  2. Microservices (handling listing, interactions, search)

We use Kafka as the central hub for data replication between CMS and microservices, following an event-driven architecture. Each service operates independently, eliminating single points of failure.

Challenges

Limited Admin Portal UI Customization

Strapi’s design language is strict. Custom features like tabbed listing pages require building new pages without reusing Strapi components.

Document Service Performance Trade-offs

Strapi’s Document Service manages relationships, content lifecycle, and audit logs automatically. However, this impacts performance at scale. We solved this by using Knex directly for high-traffic parts.

Implementing CQRS

Strapi doesn’t natively support Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS). We implemented it by:

  1. Creating a new @strapi/database instance
  2. Reusing metadata from the original database
  3. Disabling migrations for read database

Example code:

 1// register method (index.ts)
 2const db = new Database(strapi.config.get('database.read'));
 3strapi.add('readDb', db);
 4
 5// bootstrap method (index.ts)
 6const db = strapi.get('readDb');
 7db.metadata = strapi.db.metadata;
 8
 9// Usage
10const db = strapi.get('readDb');
11db.query('api:restaurants.restaurants').find(...);

Database Schema Constraints

Strapi creates default fields (id, documentId, publishedAt) with fixed configurations. We used custom migration scripts to modify field properties when needed.

Conclusion

Strapi accelerated our development by providing essential features out-of-the-box. Despite customization limitations, understanding the “Strapi way” allows efficient development, including building custom UIs using its headless capabilities.