Scaling Stories
Scaling problems rarely arrive as a single dramatic moment; they appear as slow queues, saturated dependencies, and assumptions that no longer hold. These stories cover the operational reality of systems growing past their original design.
5 stories
A Five-Person Startup Used Kubernetes for the Boring Parts and Built a Separate Control Plane for Everything Humans Waited On
“We were a five-person startup building a platform for browser-based applications that give each user a dedicated backend process. That meant we had two very different kinds of oper...”
How a Storage Security Policy Broke VM Provisioning Across Azure and GitHub Worldwide
“I work on cloud control-plane infrastructure that provisions virtual machines, scale sets, Kubernetes nodes, and the supporting identity and extension systems around them. One of t...”
How a Database Permissions Change Doubled a Feature File and Took Down a Global CDN for Six Hours
“We run one of the largest edge networks in the world — millions of requests per second, across hundreds of data centers in over 100 countries. Our network sits between users and th...”
The Empty DNS Record That Took Down 70 AWS Services for 14 Hours
“We operate one of the largest cloud infrastructure platforms in the world, running hundreds of interdependent services across dozens of regions. Our DynamoDB service in us-east-1 —...”
Two Silent Consul Bugs That Took Down a Gaming Platform for 73 Hours
“We run a gaming platform with 50 million daily active players, 18,000+ servers, and 170,000 containers. Our entire infrastructure — service discovery, container orchestration, secr...”