Square Case Study

Since 2009, Square has enabled quick and easy credit card payments to small businesses. Four years ago, the company branched out into peer-to-peer transactions via its Cash App. After some steady growth, the app rocketed in popularity in 2016, reaching millions of users over just a few months and landing at the top of the App Store downloads.

The only problem? “We had a large monolith of a few hundred thousand lines of code that was built on the assumption of one single MySQL database; it was never really designed to scale from the start,” says Engineering Manager Jon Tirsen. With users increasing by the minute, the company had to dedicate more and more expensive hardware for its database; meanwhile, Tirsen’s team of three was tapped to come up with a long-term solution for the scalability problem for Cash App.

“Because we had the growth trajectory, we really needed to solve it very, very quickly to step up to the challenge of the product side of our product,” he says. For millions of people, from taxi drivers to market vendors to big businesses, Square has made getting paid by credit card much easier since it launched its card reader and mobile app in 2010. Four years ago, the company branched out into peer-to-peer transactions via its Cash App.

After some steady growth, the app rocketed in popularity in 2016, reaching millions of users over just a few months and landing at the top of the App Store’s most popular downloads.

Source: cncf.io