Why Scaling Looks Different at Uber, Apple, and Mercado Libre

The Unlocked Conference showcased the unique scaling challenges faced by massive companies like Uber, Apple, and Mercado Libre, highlighting how similar infrastructure and caching dependencies can yield vastly different problems at scale. Uber's lesson focused on coordination issues arising from aggressive client reconnections during system slowdowns, which led to connection storms and overwhelmed nodes, necessitating updates to client libraries and retry behaviors. Apple's discussion centered on how increased payload sizes in their systems led to significant latency spikes, emphasizing the importance of visibility into payload characteristics and the improvements they implemented in their Valkey system to mitigate these issues. Mercado Libre's experience highlighted the inefficiencies and risks introduced by shared infrastructure, where bandwidth limitations and inefficient data movement across numerous internal services created significant challenges, prompting the implementation of governance tools and workload management strategies. These varied experiences underline that scaling issues often arise not from the architecture itself but from the specific pressures and assumptions embedded within each system's unique design and operational context.