When accepting events, we would be crazy to just expose the Python web process to the public Internet and say, “Alright, give me all you got!” Instead, we use two different proxying services that sit in front of our web machines:
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NGINX, our product-aware proxy, handles many of the upper bounds that we have deemed reasonable. It is responsible for a variety of bounds, but its most popular one is protecting Sentry from exceedingly large event volumes. Ever so often, a user will run into a problem where they’ve deployed their code out into the abyss, and their event volume clocks in at a few zeroes higher than what they signed up for.
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In front of NGINX, we use another proxying service called HAProxy, which acts as a delta of connections without any of that product awareness logic and has a lot higher throughput. All it does is accept connections and send them off to different NGINX servers, allowing us to gracefully add or remove NGINX servers as we see fit.
