Year in Monzo is an interactive web based experience that provides customers with unique insights in to how they spend and saved over the past year.
Generating dynamic images at scale
As part of the experience, we pre-generated two personalised images for each user which contained stats about their spending, which could then be shared on social networks.
Each image was generated using Chromium via the Chrome DevTools protocol. We went for this approach as it gave us a large amount of flexibility over the layout and design of the final image, as it was ultimately just HTML and CSS.
A GoLang service passed the HTML template in to Chromium, took a screenshot, and saved the image. Running Chromium in the backend
However, this posed a large engineering problem. How do you generate 6M unique images without failure?
Our requirements were:
- Zero failures. Two images should be generated for every single user.
- Re-runnable quickly. In the case that a bug is found close launch, we needed to be able to quickly re-generate all of the images. I.e. a process that takes multiple hours isn't acceptable.