Figma’s infrastructure: What goes into powering a web-based design tool | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma’s infrastructure team is focused on making a web-based design tool feel as fast and reliable as a desktop application. Its cloud-based, collaborative model creates demanding networking, storage, and scaling challenges, especially as organizations grow. The company is therefore evolving from a simple but operationally intensive backend toward a more mature, horizontally scalable architecture.

Figma’s Collaborative Design Model

• Figma stores designs in the cloud, giving each file a unique URL and making it a shared source of truth.
• Users can collaborate, comment, prototype, and support developer handoff without exporting files or managing separate versions.
• Its multiplayer functionality allows multiple people to view and edit files simultaneously.
• Files may contain complex shapes and large images, creating significant data-transfer demands.
• Users accustomed to desktop design tools expect fast interaction despite Figma running in a browser.

Limits of the Original Infrastructure

• Figma’s early backend favored simple strategies that worked well for smaller teams.
• The application initially loaded all shared components available to a user when opening a file.
• This approach became increasingly inefficient as organizations accumulated nearly 10,000 shared design elements.
• Growth among large customers and the broader user base exposed the limits of the original design.

Reducing Interaction Latency

• Figma still preloads more data than users immediately need, increasing backend load and slowing startup.
• Fixing this requires more than backend optimization: the client-server interaction model must be redesigned.
• The client should request information incrementally, only when it is needed.
• This change also requires coordination with product teams because existing user experiences depend on preloaded data.

Building a Horizontally Scalable Database

• At the time of the article, Figma relied on a single powerful AWS database instance.
• The simple architecture reflected the company’s preference for the KISS principle and had supported substantial growth.
• As usage increased, the database approached its capacity limits.
• Figma planned to replace it with a database layer capable of scaling horizontally, a difficult transition because nearly every system depends on the database.

Improving International Performance

• More than 80% of Figma’s weekly active users were located outside the United States.
• Their latency was affected by the round-trip distance to Figma’s Oregon datacenter.
• Figma planned to move selected infrastructure components closer to users around the world.
• The initial step was to deploy strategically placed remote proxies globally.

Figma’s broader infrastructure strategy is to preserve the simplicity that helped it move quickly while introducing selective caching, better data loading, geographic distribution, and horizontal scaling where growth demands it.