TonyBai

Sep 13, 2026 · Backend Development

2 Engineers, AI, and a Rust Rewrite: Scaling OpenAI's Storage to 1B Users

OpenAI's Habitat storage system evolved from a Python library to a distributed platform handling 70M requests/second for 1B users, with engineers detailing scaling challenges, asyncio tuning, connection pool fixes, and a 2-engineer Rust rewrite using Codex and GPT-5.5 that boosted CPU efficiency 6x and memory efficiency 15x.