OpenAI · 2026
Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users (Part II)
OpenAI's Habitat storage platform went from one shared Azure Cosmos DB container, to dedicated single-tenant containers that pushed capacity planning onto every product team, and back to a shared container by default once Azure added hot-key throttling, request-priority QoS and a new serverless mode where each physical partition scales to 10K RU/s and splits on RU usage. After failover and failback outages in late 2024, OpenAI and Azure now co-own testing and monitoring. Replicating small latency-critical datasets widely, a Valkey lookaside cache invalidated through the Cosmos DB change feed, and a Rust rewrite of the proxy cut global read p50 from about 120 ms to about 10 ms.
1B+ users across 40 regions500+ PB served by Habitatmulti-tenancyhot key throttlingCDC cache invalidationAzure Cosmos DBValkeyKafka
Meta · 2026
Shipping Media Over QUIC at Meta Scale for Instagram Live Ingest
Instagram Live ingest moved from Meta's in-house RUSH protocol to the open IETF Media over QUIC standard on iOS and Android. Edge endpoints translate MoQ frames into the RUSH format, so the backend did not change. Server-side routing let the experiment resize in minutes, the transport falls back to TCP when UDP is blocked, and the launch matched RUSH on quality and reliability.
protocol migrationedge computingfan-outQUICMoQmoxygen
GitHub · 2026
Building Git infrastructure for agent-scale development
GitHub explains why agent workloads strain Spokes, which keeps five durable copies of each repo on fileserver disks, so every added read replica slows writes. The new design coordinates only the ref update, moves compaction and GC to separate workers, and separates storage from compute: Azure Blob Storage holds the authoritative data while lightweight caching workers serve reads.
473.3 billion Git events/month7.38 billion commits in Sept 2026control plane separationread replicascachingGitSpokesAzure Blob Storage
Discord · 2026
How Discord Automates ScyllaDB Clusters at Scale
Discord's 7-person persistence team replaced fragile Python and bash scripts with the Scylla Control Plane, a Rust framework of idempotent tasks with declared preconditions, composed into YAML workflows. Jobs batch nodes by availability zone with concurrency limits to protect quorum, store their state in SQLite so they resume after interruptions, and send a webhook alert on unrecoverable errors. Operations like standing up shadow clusters and rolling upgrades went from a day and a half of babysitting to under two hours.
dozens of clusters, hundreds of database nodes7-person persistence teamdatabase operations automationidempotent taskszone-aware rolloutsScyllaDBRustYAML