Build a Social Media Data Pipeline That Actually Scales

The article presents a scalable social media data pipeline architecture replacing naive fetch-and-save loops with a four-stage system: Cron scheduler, BullMQ job queue with Redis, parallel workers, and PostgreSQL storage. It addresses common scaling failures—crashes, duplicates, missing data, and silent failures—by introducing retry logic with exponential backoff, job concurrency, rate limiting, and dead letter queues.