It turned out Uber engineers just loved Redis

… It turned out Uber engineers just loved Redis. Having a need to distribute your work? Throw that to Redis. I remember debating with some infra engineers why we couldn't throw in more redis/memcached nodes to scale our telemetry system, but I digressed. So, the price service we built was based on Redis. The service fanned out millions of requests per second to redis clusters to get information about individual hexagons of a given city, and then computed dynamic areas. We would need dozens of servers just to compute for a single city. I forgot the exact number, but let's say it was 40 servers per an average-sized city. Now multiply that by the 200+ cities we had. It was just prohibitively expensive, let alone that there couldn't other scalability bottlenecks for managing such scale. The solution was actually pretty simple. I took a look at the algorithms we used, and it was really just that we needed to compute multiple overlapping shapes. …