Using Server Sent Events to Simplify Real-time Streaming at Scale - Shopify

This post details the implementation of a Golang-based Server-Sent Events (SSE) server to replace a polling communication model for the BFCM Live Map. It explains the benefits of SSE for unidirectional server-to-client communication, contrasting it with WebSockets and polling. The implementation involves subscribing to Kafka topics, handling client connections, and ensuring scalability through Nginx load balancing and horizontally scalable pods. A Java client using okhttp-eventsource was developed for load testing to determine pod capacity.