ZGateway: Learnings from Putting a Proxy in Front of ZippyDB

Summary

Meta introduced ZGateway, a proxy placed in front of ZippyDB, its most widely used key value store, to unify traffic through the database.

Key facts

• ZGateway is a proxy deployed in front of ZippyDB, Meta's most widely used key value store.
• The proxy unifies traffic through ZippyDB.
• It also enables admission control, load balancing, cross-region resilience, and richer operations.
• Meta detailed the work in an engineering post dated 2026-09-03.

Why it matters

Teams running large key value stores can see how a proxy layer centralizes traffic while adding admission control, load balancing and cross-region resilience, features that affect how such systems are operated.