Episode

How Canva Built a Collaborative Design Platform at Scale

Podcast
The CTO Podcast with Fexingo: Technical Leadership, Architecture, and Engineering Org
Published
Jun 22, 2026
Duration seconds
562
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://audio.fexingo.com/business/the-cto-podcast/episode-0066.mp3
Audio
https://audio.fexingo.com/business/the-cto-podcast/episode-0066.mp3
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Markdown
/podcast/the-cto-podcast-with-fexingo-technical-leadership-architecture-and-engineering-org-7871807/how-canva-built-a-collaborative-design-platform-at-scale.md

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Summary

In this episode, Lucas and Luna dive into the architectural decisions behind Canva's collaborative design platform, which serves over 100 million monthly active users. They explore how the Australian unicorn rebuilt its rendering engine for real-time collaboration, the technical trade-offs involved in supporting a massive template library, and how Canva's engineering team scaled its infrastructure while maintaining performance. The discussion focuses on the migration from a monolithic backend to a microservices architecture and the implementation of WebSocket-based collaboration. Listeners will learn about the challenges of handling concurrent edits, image processing at scale, and the key lessons engineering leaders can apply to their own systems. #Canva #CollaborativeDesign #RealTimeCollaboration #WebSocket #Microservices #Scalability #RenderingEngine #ImageProcessing #EngineeringLeadership #Architecture #TechPodcast #Business #Technology #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #CTOPodcast #TechnicalLeadership #EngineeringOrg Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo