Canva, a visual communication platform empowering millions of users worldwide, faced significant data challenges as it scaled from tens of terabytes to tens of billions of documents. To overcome these challenges, Canva adopted MongoDB Atlas, leveraging its flexible document model and horizontal scaling capabilities through sharding. After initial success, the company encountered issues with metadata updates causing latency spikes and disk contention, which were addressed by merging chunks, implementing locally attached disks, and maintaining a thorough incident review process. The experience highlights the importance of flexibility, uniform chunk distribution, reliability, and collaboration in achieving massive scale and ensuring a seamless user experience.