Hundreds of millions of people use Quora to find accurate, informative, and trustworthy answers to their questions. All our infrastructure is built on top of AWS.

In this talk, we will be talking about Quanta, Quora's counting system powering our high-volume near-realtime analytics that serves many applications like ads, content views, and many dashboards.

Quanta counters support/are:

• High write throughput
• Low read latencies
• Near-realtime updates (i.e writes lag behind read by a couple of minutes)
• Arbitrary time buckets (e.g last day, last week, every week, all time...)
• Dynamic hierarchical aggregation (i.e we can specify a graph and counts are propagated along the graph edges)
• Extremely elastic and horizontally scalable
• Highly available

In this talk, we will describe the high level architecture of Quanta. We will also share our design goals, constraints and choices that enabled us to build Quanta very quickly on top of our existing infrastructure systems in cloud.