Smooth scaling: System design for high traffic
Smooth scaling: System design for high traffic
Podcast Description
Smooth Scaling: System Design for High Traffic focuses on all things scalability, reliability, and performance. Tune in for expert advice on how to scale systems, control costs, boost availability, optimize performance, and get the most out of your tech stack.
Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. He’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that remain reliable at scale.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast centers on scalability, reliability, and performance of systems. Topics include design principles for failure, simplicity versus complexity in architecture, and real-world examples from major organizations like Ticketmaster and Zalando. Episodes like 'Simple is Scalable' with Mojtaba Saroonghi delve into maintaining simplicity to enhance scalability, while 'Design for Failure' with Martin Larsen covers architectural approaches that increase resilience.
Smooth Scaling: System Design for High Traffic focuses on all things scalability, reliability, and performance. Tune in for expert advice on how to scale systems, control costs, boost availability, optimize performance, and get the most out of your tech stack.
Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. He’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that remain reliable at scale.
Chris Nesbitt-Smith has been running Kubernetes in production since version 0.4 — long before pods, before managed services, before most of today’s tooling existed. In this episode of Smooth Scaling, he sits down with José Quaresma to share what a decade of running Kubernetes for UK government citizen-facing services has taught him about scaling critical infrastructure. The conversation covers why Kubernetes was the least bad option (and largely still is), why relying on autoscaling means you’ve already lost, and how Gregor Hohpe’s “guardrails versus lane assist” metaphor changes the way you think about capacity. Chris makes the case for climbing the service stack — SaaS first, then Functions as a Service, then Platform as a Service, and only reluctantly managed Kubernetes — and explains why tech is one of the only industries that builds critical systems without ever pricing the risk of failure. A direct, opinionated look at what scaling really demands when the stakes are real and the budget isn’t infinite.
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- (00:01) – Intro
- (01:23) – Running Kubernetes since v0.4 in UK government
- (04:56) – Why pod rescheduling went full circle
- (09:07) – “Brave and stupid”: running alpha-stage K8s in production
- (14:58) – Helm, DevOps as a job title, and cultural drift
- (16:43) – Climb the service stack (SaaS → FaaS → PaaS → managed K8s)
- (20:48) – Why engineers resist giving up control
- (23:52) – Tech doesn’t quantify risk the way every other industry does
- (27:14) – If you’re relying on autoscaling, it’s already too late
- (28:30) – The KubeCon Black Friday game: dropping requests as strategy
- (33:03) – Graceful degradation up the stack
- (35:34) – “Mostly myths”: data sovereignty vs. data residency
- (38:35) – Cloudflare and “deploy to the world” as a different paradigm
- (41:53) – The legacy debt sitting in UK public sector tech
- (46:03) – Rapid-fire: build advice, recommended reading, scalability is…
Chris Nesbitt-Smith is an independent technology strategist, a Kubernetes instructor at LearnKube, and the architect of the UK Government’s National Digital Exchange. Based in London, he works at the intersection of policy, security, and modern infrastructure — advising UK and international government departments, multinational enterprises, and large NGOs on cloud-native transformation and DevSecOps. A regular speaker at KubeCon, DevSecCon, and Open Source Summit, his talks span container security, policy-as-versioned-code, and platform engineering. He also blogs regularly on his blog Cloudy with Chance of Freefall.
🔗 Connect
Guest Chris Nesbitt-Smith: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/cnesbittsmith
Host José Quaresma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-quaresma/
This podcast is researched by Joseph Thwaites, produced by Perseu Mandillo, and brought to you by Queue-it, your virtual waiting room partner.
© Queue-it, 2026
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