Building a Production-Ready Scraping Infrastructure: Architecture Behind SociaVault

When you make a request to api.sociavault.com, you get a JSON response in a few seconds.

But behind that simple API call lies a complex distributed system designed to fight the world's most sophisticated anti-bot defenses.

Scraping google.com once is easy. Scraping it 1 million times a day without getting banned is an engineering challenge.

In this post, we're pulling back the curtain to show you how we built SociaVault.

The Core Challenges

1. IP Blocking: Platforms ban datacenter IPs instantly.
2. Fingerprinting: TLS fingerprinting (JA3) can identify non-browser traffic.
3. Browser Challenges: Cloudflare Turnstile, Datadome, and CAPTCHAs.
4. Scale: Handling spikes in traffic without latency.

The Architecture

graph TD
    User[User API Request] --> LB[Load Balancer]
    LB --> API[API Gateway (Node.js)]
    API --> Queue[Redis Queue (BullMQ)]
    Queue --> Worker1[Scraping Worker]
    Queue --> Worker2[Scraping Worker]
    Worker1 --> Proxy[Proxy Rotator]
    Proxy --> Target[Social Platform]

1. The API Gateway (Express + TypeScript)

This is the entry point. It handles authentication, rate limiting (for our users), and validation. It doesn't do any scraping. It simply pushes a "Job" to Redis.

2. The Queue (Redis + BullMQ)

Scraping is unpredictable. Sometimes a request takes 2 seconds, sometimes 10. We use an asynchronous queue to manage load. If traffic spikes, the queue grows, but the servers don't crash.

3. The Workers (Playwright + Stealth)

This is the heavy lifting. We run a fleet of worker nodes that execute the scraping logic.

• Headless Browsers: We use highly modified versions of Playwright.
• Stealth Plugins: We patch browser fingerprints (Canvas, WebGL, Fonts) to look exactly like a real Chrome user on Windows/Mac.

4. The Proxy Layer (The Secret Sauce)

We don't use AWS IPs. We use a network of Residential Proxies (real home IP addresses).

• Rotation: Every request gets a new IP.
• Geolocation: If you request "Google UK", we route through a London residential IP.
• Retries: If a proxy is slow or banned, the system automatically retries with a new one before you even know it failed.

Solving CAPTCHAs

We use a hybrid approach:

1. Avoidance: The best way to solve a CAPTCHA is to not trigger it. High-quality proxies and good fingerprints prevent 90% of CAPTCHAs.
2. AI Solvers: For image CAPTCHAs, we use computer vision models.
3. Human Fallback: For impossible CAPTCHAs, we route to human click farms (rarely needed).

Monitoring & Observability

We track "Success Rate" per domain per minute.

• If TikTok success rate drops below 95%, an alert fires.
• We can instantly swap proxy providers or update browser headers globally.

Conclusion

You could build this infrastructure yourself. But it would cost you thousands of dollars in proxy commitments and hundreds of engineering hours.

SociaVault lets you rent this infrastructure for pennies per request. We handle the arms race against anti-bots so you can focus on your data.

Use our infrastructure: Get your API Key