Tech Behind Big Tech

Curated system design and infrastructure articles from the engineers who built Google, Netflix, Meta, and the rest of the internet.

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Netflix

How Netflix Connects Billions of Member Actions in Real Time with a Distributed Graph

Netflix built a Real-Time Distributed Graph to stitch together member activity across devices, apps, and business lines - processing over 5 million…

Apache KafkaApache KafkaApache FlinkApache FlinkApache Iceberg
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Dropbox

Insights from Dropbox's Executive Roundtable on AI and Engineering Productivity

How Dropbox transformed AI coding tools from grassroots experiments into a company-level priority - and what they learned about measuring…

Microsoft

How Microsoft Built the Learn MCP Server

How Microsoft built a production MCP server on Azure to give AI agents real-time, grounded access to Microsoft Learn documentation at scale.

OpenAI

How OpenAI Scaled PostgreSQL to 800 Million ChatGPT Users

OpenAI runs ChatGPT for 800 million users on a single-primary PostgreSQL instance with nearly 50 read replicas - no sharding, no distributed…

PostgreSQLPostgreSQLRedisRedisKubernetesKubernetes
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Netflix

How Netflix Migrated 400 PostgreSQL Clusters to Aurora with Zero Data Loss

Netflix built a fully automated, self-service pipeline to migrate its fleet of RDS PostgreSQL databases to Aurora PostgreSQL - achieving near-zero…

PostgreSQLPostgreSQL
Cloudflare

How Cloudflare Uses Lava Lamps to Encrypt the Internet

Secure encryption requires true randomness - but computers are fundamentally deterministic. Cloudflare solved this by pointing a camera at 100 lava…

NGINXNginx
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Shopify

How Shopify Tamed a 2.8 Million Line Rails Monolith

Shopify's core Rails app had grown to 2.8 million lines of code and 500,000 commits, with hundreds of developers adding features simultaneously.…

GraphQLGraphQL