We’re introducing ZGateway, the proxy we are using to unify traffic through ZippyDB, Meta’s most widely-used key value store.
As a bonus, it also enables admission control, load balancing, cross-region resilience, and richer operations.
ZippyDB is the most widely used key value store at Meta, backing product metadata, counters, and configuration, and can serve billions of operations per second across a globally distributed fleet.
A previous post described how ZippDB works. This post is about the layer in front of it: ZGateway, the proxy through which we are unifying ZippyDB client traffic.
ZGateway grew out of the need to manage the sprawl of ZippyDB’s client fleet, and its value turned out to be structural. A ZippyDB client might be one of more than a million hosts, owned by hundreds of teams, that we cannot change quickly. A proxy sits in a different position entirely — in the path of many clients at once — and that shared vantage point lets it do what no single client could.
