How teams scaled Envoy: 2 real case studies
2 of the 73 engineering write-ups in our database mention Envoy in their stack. They come from 2 companies (Dropbox and OpenAI) and were published in 2026 (1 undated). Techniques that show up most often alongside Envoy: load balancing (2). 1 of the 2 state concrete scale numbers, for example "70 million+ requests/sec" (OpenAI). Each card below links to our short summary and the original post.
Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users
OpenAI's Habitat storage platform grew from a Python client library over Cosmos DB into a central service handling 70M+ requests per second. The team ran many low-concurrency Python processes to keep asyncio delay down, switched aiohttp connection reuse from LIFO to FIFO to stop a metastable failure, used Envoy for connection fan-in, kept a deliberately simple NoSQL API, then rewrote the service in Rust.
How we migrated Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
Dropbox moved its edge traffic proxy from Nginx to Envoy for better observability and extensibility.