TL;DR Like numerous other orgs, we transitioned (actually, flipped overnight) to being fully remote during the first COVID pandemic lockdown in 2020. It worked out great in the first year, started losing its sheen in the second year, and became detrimental to creativity and collaboration by the third year. It failed for us in the most critical areas. We then…
Zerodha Tech
https://zerodha.tech/ · 14 posts · history since 2001 · active
28 Mar 2024
13 Feb 2024
At Zerodha, many million users login and use our financial platforms every day. Over the recent months, on an average day, 1.5+ million users have been executing stock and derivative transactions. On a volatile day, this number could easily double. After a trading session concludes and all the number-crunching, tallying, and “backoffice” operations are completed—with file dumps received from stock…
22 Mar 2023
At Zerodha, we run a multitude of internal and public-facing services that generate copious amounts of logs. While developers use these logs to debug or troubleshoot incidents, some services also emit logs that must be persisted for prolonged periods to comply with numerous regulatory requirements. In this post, I will delve into our experiences with the ELK stack, why it…
6 May 2022
Over time, I have come to realise that the term user “engagement” in software, more often than not, is a thinly veiled proxy for user entrapment, whether intentional on the part of software designers or not. The trend of shallow user numbers and “engagement” metrics taking centre stage in business valuations has created perverse incentives at a massive scale for…
17 Jan 2022
At Zerodha, the first mobile version our flagship trading platform Kite was written as a native Android app in 2015. After building a cross-platform version in React Native in 2017, we finally settled for a full rewrite in Flutter in 2018, a choice that has paid off really well for us. There were several factors and trade-offs that prompted these…
28 Jul 2021
Over the last year, owing to the unexpected rally in capital markets, Zerodha’s customer base has more than tripled, significantly increasing the number of concurrent users on our platforms along with the traffic and load they generate on numerous systems in the background. For context, in January 2020, we were handling 2+ million retail trades daily. In April 2020, it…
21 Apr 2021
This post is in the context of the large, data heavy PostgreSQL instances that store historical transactional data and reports, the databases that power Console and its large scale number crunching and reporting. It talks about how we self-host, tune, and manage all our DB instances on bare EC2 instances. For high availability and backups, we use simple failover replicas…
24 Nov 2020
At Zerodha, we process millions of trades in real-time, where each trade comes into the system as concurrent high throughput HTTP requests. Each trade increases the latency for subsequent orders in the queue that are under processing at the same time at our OMS (Order Management System). When a single order comes through to the OMS, it goes through a…
21 Sept 2020
ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ (Namaskāra)! This is not a post on fintech, or even technology for that matter. This is the story of a product of tenacity, selflessness, and passion; a product that will transcend and outlive most technology we know of. This is the story of a massive dictionary that will become the window to a language spoken by tens of millions…
14 Jun 2020
“Scaling” is not a specific technique but an entire spectrum that stretches all the way from “Google scale” to the K8s cluster Karan runs on a Raspberry Pi plugged into a 12V shaver outlet in his bathroom to encrypt his DNS queries for peak privacy, while he asks Alexa to dim the lights and play his favorite non-mainstream indie music.…
26 Apr 2020
On any given day, we handle around 15% of daily retail trading volume across all stock exchanges in India. Billions of requests generated in the process are handled by a suite of systems we have built in-house. Also, we are very particular on self-hosting as many dependencies as possible, everything from CRMs to large databases, Kafka clusters, mail servers etc.…
5 Apr 2020
Zerodha, now India’s largest stock broker, bootstrapped and profitable, turns ten years old this year. The Zerodha tech team turns seven years old. The tech team has remained largely elusive over the course of our existence. While we have pondered starting a tech blog for more than half a decade, we have often found ourselves too busy building the fundamental…
1 Jan 2001
Apps libredesk ★ 2554 Go Open source, self-hosted omnichannel customer support desk. Live chat, email, and more in a single binary. GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 Last updated on June 6, 2026 flowctl ★ 316 Go An open source self-service workflow execution platform Apache License 2.0 Last updated on June 6, 2026 whatomate ★ 1257 Go Whatomate is an…
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