Smooth Scaling: System Design for High Traffic

When an AI agent shows up at your checkout, most systems still see a bot and block it. Alexander Guensche is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS and the lead of TSAI, the Trust Signals for Agentic Interactions protocol that AWS is building with Trusted Shops. Moji Sarooghi is a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, global leader of online traffic orchestration and managing high traffic events for the worlds biggest brands. In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, the two of them walk host Jose Quaresma through what replaces the old human-versus-bot binary. They get into why trust and identity are not the same thing, why you can have one without the other, and how a merchant can respond to an agent with something more useful than yes or no. Alex is candid about the line the protocol would not cross: identifying human users, which he describes as a slide toward totalitarian systems that rate people. The conversation closes on where this lands in practice, from reputation feedback loops to the traffic-orchestration layer Queue-it is building. A grounded look at what trust means when your visitor is software acting for someone else.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Intro

Alex is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS with 20 years of IT experience in expert and leadership roles. He is a strong advocate of agile and DevOps practices, and he enjoys seeing serverless, cloud-native and event-driven architectures deployed at scale. He has delivered large transformation projects and successfully developed own and customers’ businesses. As an international speaker, he has held advanced technology sessions at a wide range of events.

Mojtaba Sarooghi is a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it. Moji was one of the company’s first employees, starting his journey as a software developer over 10 years ago. He is highly experienced with AWS services, product and architectural design, managing developer teams, and defining and executing on product vision.

Alexander Guensche: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-guensche/
Moji Sarooghi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mojtaba-sarooghi/
Host José Quaresma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-quaresma/ 

This podcast is produced and researched by Perseu Mandillo, and brought to you by Queue-it, your virtual waiting room partner. 

© Queue-it, 2026

Suman Karumuri has spent 17+ years building observability systems at Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, and Airbnb. He was tech lead for Zipkin at Twitter, co-authored the OpenTracing specification that fed into OpenTelemetry, and has now replaced Elasticsearch twice at high-traffic platforms. In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, Suman walks host Jose Quaresma through KalDB, the open-source, cloud-native log search engine he is building into a product, which runs at petabyte scale at Slack and Airbnb. They get into why he keeps rewriting Elasticsearch instead of tuning it, how separating compute from storage on S3 changes what a log system can do, and the recovery-task trick that keeps fresh logs visible when volume spikes 10x. The back half turns to agentic AI: why agents querying logs in unpredictable bursts break traditional log stacks, why you can't sample data anymore, and what engineering leaders should measure before the bill explodes. A concrete, in-the-weeds look at running log search when the primary user is no longer human.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Intro

Suman Karumuri is the founder of KalDB, the open-source cloud-native log search engine he is now building into a product. KalDB runs at petabyte scale at Slack, Salesforce, and Airbnb. He spent 17+ years building observability systems at Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, and Airbnb, was tech lead for Zipkin at Twitter, and co-authored the OpenTracing specification under the CNCF, which became the foundation of OpenTelemetry. He is based in San Francisco.

Suman has replaced Elasticsearch twice at high-traffic platforms. And with the rise of Agentic AI querying log systems in non-deterministic bursts, this places a whole new kind of stress on those systems to perform at high scale.

Suman Karumuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mansu/
Host José Quaresma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-quaresma/ 

This podcast is produced and researched by Perseu Mandillo, and brought to you by Queue-it, your virtual waiting room partner. 

© Queue-it, 2026

Klaus Koefoed spent more than 25 years in IT services and consultancy, at Capgemini, Deloitte, and Accenture, before taking over as CEO of T-Systems in Northern Europe. In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, Klaus walks host Jose Quaresma through the rise of sovereign cloud: why a theme almost nobody raised two years ago turned urgent in early 2025, and what actually changed. They get into Europe's real position against the American hyperscalers, why the answer is rarely either/or, and how leaders should weigh the data, operational, technology, and legal layers of sovereignty. Klaus is candid that none of this comes for free. Multi-cloud adds complexity, and the right answer depends entirely on who you are. The back half turns to sovereign AI, where T-Systems and NVIDIA have stood up a billion-euro Industrial AI Cloud, and where Europe's gigafactory ambitions, real use cases like simulated wind tunnels, and AI Scrum Teams come in. A grounded, practical look at building and running infrastructure when geopolitics is suddenly part of the architecture.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Intro

Klaus Koefoed is CEO of T-Systems Northern Europe, leading Deutsche Telekom's B2B IT-service business across the Nordics, UK and Ireland. He joined T-Systems in June 2023 from Capgemini, where he was VP and Nordic Head of Cloud Strategy & Transformation Advisory. Before that, he was a Partner at Deloitte Consulting, with earlier years at Accenture. Copenhagen-based, with 25+ years in IT services and consultancy. His move from advising to operating arrived just as digital sovereignty stopped being a compliance footnote and became a board-level resilience question. Under Klaus, T-Systems Northern Europe has pushed hard on Sovereign Solutions for Europe and especially T Cloud Public (formerly known as Open Telekom Cloud) — now ten years old enterprise grade European Public Cloud — and recently opened the Industrial AI Cloud, Europe's largest sovereign AI-infrastructure, with 10,000 GPUs connected to the existing portfolio. That makes him one of very few executives in the region who can credibly talk about running sovereign cloud and sovereign AI at scale in Europe. 

🔗 Connect 
Klaus Koefoed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/klauskoefoed/ 
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

Sam Dhar has spent 14 years building infrastructure at Cisco, Amazon Alexa, and Adobe, and now works as Senior Staff Engineer and AI infrastructure leader at Galileo, the enterprise AI evaluation platform. In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, Sam walks host Jose Quaresma through Cloud Prem: deploying your full product stack inside the customer's own cloud environment instead of running it as SaaS. They get into why the model is resurging, and it mostly comes down to data. Enterprises want ownership and control, plus a heavy compliance load (SOC 2, HIPAA, fully air-gapped government workloads), and they do not want a vendor sitting in the read path of their most sensitive data. Sam is candid about the hard parts. Cloud Prem can be a losing game on margins, deployment is the slowest thing in the pipeline, and every customer environment is different enough to reset the work. The conversation closes on AI: why it makes Cloud Prem urgent, the brutal GPU shortage, and why self-hosting an Opus-class model is still out of reach for most companies. A direct, practitioner-level look at where enterprise AI infrastructure is actually heading.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Intro

Satyam “Sam” Dhar is a senior Staff Engineer and AI infrastructure leader at Galileo, where he designs systems that support real-time LLM workflows at enterprise scale. Prior to Galileo, he spent over six years at Adobe, contributing to AI-powered product development, evaluation platforms, and large-scale data systems. Earlier in his career at Amazon, he worked on high-throughput distributed services supporting Alexa’s device orchestration. Based in San Francisco, Sam’s insights and commentary have been featured in Newsweek, CNET, InfoQ, The New Stack, The Deep View, and others. He is also a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

🔗 Connect 
Sam Dhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyamdhar/ 
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

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.

Episode page

---

• (00:01) - Intro

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

In this episode, José Quaresma sits down with two Queue-it engineers — Zaigham Sarfaraz, Engineering Manager, and Šimon Bučko, Senior Software Engineer — to talk autoscaling in production. They cover the fundamentals of horizontal and vertical scaling, why stateless architecture matters for scaling out, and what happens when the metrics you're scaling on don't match your actual bottleneck. The conversation gets real when Zaigham shares a war story of autoscaling failing during an iPhone launch — one million users in one second — and how that experience reshaped how the team thinks about pre-scaling for extreme traffic. Šimon challenges the temptation to rely on default configurations and explains why the days you most need autoscaling to work are exactly the days it might not.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Introduction

Šimon Bučko is a Senior Software Engineer at Queue-it, working across full-stack development. He is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional with strong experience in software architecture and bridging the gap between business needs and technical execution. 

Zaigham Sarfaraz is an Engineering Manager at Queue-it with over 15 years of experience across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and people leadership. He is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and plays a key role in ensuring stable system operations while contributing to the continuous improvement of Queue-it's backend architecture. 

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2026

In this episode, José Quaresma speaks with Iris Dyrmishi, Senior Observability Engineer at Miro, about building an observability platform that hundreds of engineers actually trust and use. Iris explains how her team treats observability as an internal product, walks through Miro's tracing migration from Jaeger and Zipkin to OpenTelemetry with zero disruption, and shares how teams now use traces proactively to find bottlenecks before they become outages. The conversation also covers the honest downsides — alert noise, dashboard sprawl, and the cost of observability — including a recent example using eBPF and Grafana Beyla to uncover hidden networking expenses that transformed Miro's cloud bill.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Intro

Iris Dyrmishi is a Senior Observability Engineer at Miro, where she builds and maintains the company's observability platform. She started as a backend engineer before moving into SRE roles at Worten Portugal and Farfetch, where she developed her specialty in tracing and drove OpenTelemetry migrations across large engineering organisations without disrupting existing workflows. A CNCF Ambassador, co-organiser of Kubernetes Community Days Porto, and active voice in the observability community, she writes extensively about practical adoption challenges and has spoken at KubeCon EU and on the o11ycast podcast. Her guiding philosophy: observability is a team sport.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2026

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma speaks with Hans Skovgaard, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Queue-it, about a shift that is already underway and accelerating fast: the internet now carries more automated bot traffic than human traffic — and agentic AI is about to make that gap much wider.

Hans explains why the old model of "bots versus humans" is fundamentally broken, and why the real question is no longer who is visiting your site, but what their intent is. The conversation covers why autoscaling can no longer protect against the extreme traffic bursts that AI agents will generate, how to make bot attacks economically unviable, and what a future of AI agents buying concert tickets on your behalf actually looks like in practice. Hans also unpacks the evolving landscape of digital identity — from payment certificates to the EU Digital Identity Wallet — and what it means to build systems that can tell a genuine buyer from a scalper running 100,000 simultaneous requests.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Introduction

© Queue-it, 2026

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma sits down with Art Huggard, former VP of E-Commerce at Build-A-Bear, who transformed the company's online presence from a crashing website to a $70 million business over eight years. Art shares his unconventional path from chemical engineering to e-commerce leadership at Bass Pro Shops, Hudson's Bay, and Build-A-Bear. He reveals how the company went from website crashes every hour during the 2016 holiday season to successfully managing viral product launches like Baby Yoda that sold out in four hours. Art discusses Queue-it's virtual waiting room for handling extreme traffic spikes, real-time system tuning during flash sales, and the importance of balancing technical infrastructure with guest experience. The conversation covers cloud scalability challenges, order management bottlenecks in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and what it takes to handle 300+ orders per minute. The episode illustrates how preparation and cross-industry lessons can turn unpredictable demand into business success.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast

Art Huggard is a leading expert in Digital Commerce. He has helped many well known brands such as Build-A-Bear, Bass Pro Shops, Tracker Boats, Hudson Bay and others move from chaos to High Growth. He has a keen understanding of the entire customer ecosystem including Web, Order Management, CRM, Loyalty and Digital Marketing. Known for building high performance teams Art has been an excellent mentor to many at the companies where he has worked. Most recently Art has formed Gateway-Commerce (www.gateway-commerce.com) where he provides fractional consulting to companies looking to make significant improvements to how they serve their guests. 

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. © Queue-it, 2026

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma talks with Ryan Sherlock, Director of Engineering at Intercom, about the realities of scaling databases in a fast-growing SaaS product. Ryan shares Intercom’s journey from a single MySQL database through Aurora, proxies, and per-customer scaling patterns—and what eventually pushed the team toward PlanetScale. The conversation also explores Intercom’s heartbeat-based approach to incident detection and response, focusing on customer impact rather than infrastructure metrics.

Episode page

---

• (00:00) - Intro and episode overview

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2026