All Resources
Showing 60 of 1210
How Airtable Models a Flexible Database
The data model that lets a spreadsheet behave like a relational database — without the user ever seeing a schema.
How Google Colab Runs Untrusted Code Safely
Isolating millions of strangers' notebooks with sandboxing, gVisor, and disposable VMs.
How Datadog Ingests Trillions of Events
The pipeline that swallows metrics, traces, and logs from millions of hosts in real time.
How DeepSeek Trained a Frontier Model for Less
The architecture and training tricks behind a GPT-class model at a fraction of the GPU cost.
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
The migration from Cassandra to ScyllaDB, and how message history stays fast at that scale.
How Dropbox Scaled Storage On and Off AWS
Block storage, Magic Pocket, and the economics of leaving the cloud you grew up on.
Gmail — A System Design Walkthrough
From SMTP ingestion to search: the moving parts behind the world's default inbox.
How Gmail Handles 44 Trillion Emails
Storage, indexing, and spam at a scale where every byte of overhead is measured in petabytes.
How Google Maps Routes the Planet
Tiling the world, contraction hierarchies, and live traffic — the graph problem at global scale.
How Google Search Indexes the Web
Crawling, the inverted index, and serving a query in under 200ms across billions of pages.
How Instagram Scales PostgreSQL
Sharding, logical IDs, and the disciplined Postgres patterns that carried Instagram to a billion users.
How Jira Models Projects at Scale
Custom fields, workflows, and permissions — modeling infinite flexibility without melting the database.
How Notion Designed Its Block Data Model
Everything is a block: the recursive data model that makes docs, databases, and pages one primitive.
How Reddit Serves the Front Page
Vote counting, caching, and the read-heavy architecture behind the internet's front page.
How Replit's AI Agent Ships Code
Orchestrating an autonomous coding agent — sandboxes, tools, and the loop that writes and runs code.
How Roblox Handles 47M Concurrent Players
Game servers, matchmaking, and the edge network that keeps a virtual world in sync.
How Slack Delivers Real-Time Messaging
The channel server, WebSocket fan-out, and how Slack keeps millions of tabs live at once.
How Stripe Runs Ruby at Scale
Idempotency, sorbet types, and the reliability engineering behind moving money in Ruby.
How TikTok's Recommendation Engine Works
The candidate → ranking → serving pipeline that makes the For You feed frighteningly good.
How WhatsApp Serves 2 Billion Users
Erlang, a tiny team, and the messaging architecture that famously ran on a shoestring.
How YouTube Streams 1 Billion Hours a Day
Transcoding, the CDN, and adaptive bitrate — delivering more video than the rest of the web combined.
Why AWS Builds Its Own Everything
Nitro, Graviton, custom silicon — the vertical-integration playbook behind the world's biggest cloud.
How CrowdStrike Crashed 8.5 Million Computers
A single content update, a kernel driver, and the anatomy of the largest IT outage in history.
Why Amazon Killed Its Own Microservices
The monitoring service Prime Video rebuilt as a monolith — and the 90% cost cut that made headlines.
Snowflake — The Architecture
Separating storage from compute: the design that let a data warehouse scale each independently.
Starlink — How It Routes Packets
Phased-array antennas, laser inter-satellite links, and routing IP through low-earth orbit.
BitTorrent — A Protocol Teardown
Pieces, peers, and the tit-for-tat algorithm behind the internet's most durable P2P protocol.
How to Design a URL Shortener (TinyURL)
Complete system design breakdown of a URL shortener service like TinyURL or Bitly, covering high-level architecture, database design, hash generation, and scaling strategies.
System Design: Container Registry (Docker Hub-scale)
Learn how to design a container registry like Docker Hub that stores, distributes, and manages container images at massive scale. Covers content-addressable storage, layer deduplication, and geo-replication.
System Design: Secrets Management System
Design a secrets management system like HashiCorp Vault that securely stores, rotates, and audits access to API keys, passwords, and certificates at enterprise scale.
System Design: Feature Flag System
Design a feature flag system like LaunchDarkly that supports percentage rollouts, user targeting, A/B testing, and sub-millisecond flag evaluation for high-traffic applications.
System Design: API Gateway
Design a production-grade API gateway that handles authentication, rate limiting, request routing, protocol translation, and observability for microservices architectures at scale.
System Design: Rate Limiter
Design a distributed rate limiter that supports token bucket, sliding window, and fixed window algorithms, handling millions of requests per second with Redis-backed counters and minimal latency overhead.
System Design: Service Mesh
Design a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd that provides zero-trust mTLS, intelligent traffic management, observability, and resilience patterns for microservices without application code changes.
System Design: Distributed Configuration Management
Design a distributed configuration management system like etcd or Consul that provides strongly consistent key-value storage with watch semantics for dynamic service configuration at scale.
System Design: Log Aggregation Pipeline
Design a log aggregation pipeline like the ELK Stack or Datadog that collects, processes, stores, and searches logs from thousands of services at petabyte scale with real-time querying.
System Design: Distributed Tracing System
Design a distributed tracing system like Jaeger or Zipkin that correlates requests across microservices, identifies performance bottlenecks, and provides flame graph visualizations at high-throughput scale.
System Design: Container Orchestration (Kubernetes-scale)
Design a container orchestration system like Kubernetes that schedules, scales, and manages containerized workloads across thousands of nodes with self-healing, rolling updates, and declarative configuration.
System Design: Service Discovery System
Design a service discovery system like Consul or Eureka that enables microservices to dynamically find and communicate with each other using health-checked registries and DNS or HTTP lookup interfaces.
System Design: Load Balancer
Design a software load balancer that distributes traffic across backend servers using algorithms like consistent hashing, least connections, and weighted round-robin, with health checking and session persistence.
System Design: Distributed Lock Service
Design a distributed lock service that provides mutual exclusion across processes using Redlock, ZooKeeper, or lease-based approaches, with fencing tokens to handle process pauses and clock skew.
System Design: Distributed Job Scheduler
Design a distributed job scheduler like Airflow or Quartz that executes cron jobs and DAG-based workflows reliably at scale, with exactly-once guarantees, retry logic, and failure recovery.
System Design: Task Queue System
Design a distributed task queue like Celery or Sidekiq that reliably dispatches background jobs to workers with priority queues, retries, dead-letter handling, and at-least-once delivery guarantees.
System Design: Event Sourcing System
Design an event sourcing system that stores state as an immutable sequence of domain events, enabling temporal queries, audit trails, event replay for projections, and eventual consistency across microservices.
System Design: CQRS Architecture
Design a CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) system that separates read and write models for optimal scaling, using event-driven synchronization between the command side and query-optimized projections.
System Design: Circuit Breaker Pattern
Design a circuit breaker system that prevents cascading failures in distributed systems by tracking downstream error rates and automatically opening the circuit to fail fast during outages.
System Design: API Versioning Strategy
Design a robust API versioning system that manages multiple concurrent API versions, enables backward-compatible evolution, and provides seamless deprecation and migration paths for API consumers.
System Design: Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture
Design a multi-tenant SaaS architecture that isolates tenant data, enforces resource quotas, and scales from startup to enterprise customers with configurable isolation models and zero cross-tenant data leakage.
System Design: Blue-Green Deployment System
Design a blue-green deployment system that enables zero-downtime production releases by maintaining two identical production environments and switching traffic atomically between them.
System Design: Chaos Engineering Platform
Design a chaos engineering platform like Chaos Monkey or LitmusChaos that safely injects failures into production and staging systems to validate resilience, discover weaknesses, and build confidence in distributed system reliability.
System Design: Monitoring & Alerting System
Design a monitoring and alerting system like Prometheus and Grafana that collects metrics from thousands of services, evaluates alert rules, and delivers notifications with minimal false positives.
System Design: Distributed Metrics Collection
Design a distributed metrics collection system that aggregates counters, gauges, and histograms from millions of sources with sub-minute resolution, supporting both push and pull ingestion at petabyte scale.
System Design: Health Check & Heartbeat System
Design a health check and heartbeat system that monitors service availability, detects failures within seconds, and integrates with load balancers and service discovery to automatically route traffic away from unhealthy instances.
System Design: Canary Deployment System
Design a canary deployment system that gradually shifts traffic to new service versions, automatically monitors error rates and latency, and rolls back if statistical analysis detects regressions.
System Design: Instagram
Deep dive into designing Instagram at scale, covering photo/video uploads, feed generation, follower graphs, and CDN strategies used by systems serving 2 billion users.
System Design: Twitter/X
Comprehensive system design of Twitter/X covering tweet ingestion, real-time timeline generation, trending topics, and the unique challenges of celebrity fan-out at 500M users.
System Design: Facebook
End-to-end system design of Facebook's core platform including News Feed, social graph, photo storage, and real-time notifications at 3 billion user scale.
System Design: TikTok
System design breakdown of TikTok's video recommendation engine, upload pipeline, and For You Page algorithm that delivers personalized short-form video to 1 billion users.
System Design: LinkedIn
System design of LinkedIn covering professional social graph, job recommendations, connection degree calculation, and feed ranking for the world's largest professional network.
System Design: Pinterest
System design of Pinterest covering pin ingestion, visual search, interest graph, and the board/pin data model that serves 450 million monthly users browsing billions of images.