Epic Games was going off in 2020, as Fortnite was huge and only getting bigger - both in terms of playerbase and codebase size. That meant that the engineers as Epic had to figure out a reliable, fast way to compile and test playable game builds. This turned out to be trickier than it sounds, since ...

Back in 2018, Chick-Fil-A was suffering from success - customers were flocking there due to its high quality and unmatched customer service. It wasn't uncommon to see lines going out the door. Many of their busiest restaurants were handling over three times the volume they were designed for. They h...

Twitch ran into problems when its globally distributed Point of Presence (PoP) server fleet couldn't handle faults or cyclical traffic loads efficiently. This was all due to its stinky HAProxy setup which stupidly sent video data from one PoP to the same origin, regardless of whether or not that ori...

Flash sales on Shopify aren't like those Black Friday stampedes you see IRL. Those are seasonal, whereas on Shopify, these shopping frenzies can happen at any time. For example, online brands will generate tons of hype for limited edition product drops and subsequently bombard Shopify servers with t...

Back in 2014, Netflix developed this nifty video processing platform called Reloaded, which was designed to convert high quality media files into compressed assets for streaming purposes. Reloaded was initially built as a monolith. And over the years, it began to grow (uh oh). As a wise philosopher...