tl;dr:“As DoorDash made the move from made-to-order restaurant delivery into the Convenience and Grocery (CnG) business, we had to find a way to manage an online inventory per merchant per store that went from tens of items to tens of thousands of items. Having multiple CnG merchants on the platform means constantly refreshing their offerings, a huge inventory management problem that would need to be operated at scale. To solve this scaling problem our team built a write-heavy inventory platform that would be able to keep up with all the changes on the platform… This article outlines the challenges faced while building the inventory platform and how we solved them after multiple iterations of experimentation and analysis.”