DNS is perhaps the largest eventually consistent system in the world

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Sep 03, 2025 • 1 min read


DNS is perhaps the largest eventually consistent system in the world.

A single request travels through recursive resolvers, root servers, TLDs, and authoritative name servers, with caching at every layer to make it feel instant.

The fact that this happens billions of times a second, across every corner of the globe, with so many independent actors cooperating without a central authority, is wild.

And don’t even get me started on how the internet itself works. Packets, literally just light pulses, race across networks and switches to reach the right machines, processes, and threads in milliseconds.

It almost feels magical.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses