// SYSTEM_DESIGN

System Design Interview Questions

Comprehensive system design breakdowns with architecture diagrams, database schemas, and scaling strategies. Prepare for system design interviews.

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SYSTEM_DESIGN

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.

url-shortenerhashingsystem-design

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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-designcontainer-registrydocker

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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-designsecrets-managementvault

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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-designfeature-flagslaunchdarkly

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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-designapi-gatewaymicroservices

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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-designrate-limiterredis

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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-designservice-meshistio

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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-designconfiguration-managementetcd

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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-designlog-aggregationelasticsearch

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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-designdistributed-tracingjaeger

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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-designkubernetescontainer-orchestration

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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-designservice-discoveryconsul

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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-designload-balancerconsistent-hashing

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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-designdistributed-lockredlock

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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-designjob-schedulercron

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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-designtask-queuecelery

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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-designevent-sourcingcqrs

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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-designcqrsevent-driven

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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-designcircuit-breakerresilience

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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-designapi-versioningbackward-compatibility

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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-designmulti-tenancysaas

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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-designblue-green-deploymentzero-downtime

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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-designchaos-engineeringresilience

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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.

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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.

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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-designhealth-checkheartbeat

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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-designcanary-deploymentprogressive-delivery

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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-designinstagramsocial-media

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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-designtwittersocial-media

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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-designfacebooksocial-media

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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-designtiktokvideo-streaming

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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.

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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.

system-designpinterestimage-search

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System Design: Snapchat

System design of Snapchat focusing on ephemeral media delivery, Snap Map, Stories, and the unique challenge of message delivery guarantees for disappearing content.

system-designsnapchatephemeral-content

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System Design: Reddit

System design of Reddit covering the post/comment data model, vote counting, feed ranking algorithms (Hot, Top, New), and scaling a link aggregation platform with 1.5 billion monthly visitors.

system-designredditvoting

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System Design: News Feed System

Generic system design for a scalable news feed, covering fan-out strategies, feed ranking, pull vs push architectures, and how to handle celebrity accounts efficiently.

system-designnews-feedfan-out

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System Design: Social Graph

System design of a social graph service covering bidirectional friendship, follower/following relationships, graph traversal for degree connections, and mutual friends at billion-user scale.

system-designsocial-graphgraph-database

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System Design: Uber

A deep dive into designing Uber's ride-hailing platform covering real-time matching, GPS tracking, surge pricing, and global scale. Essential reading for engineers preparing for system design interviews.

system-designuberride-hailing

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System Design: Lyft

Explore how Lyft's ride-sharing architecture handles real-time driver matching, dynamic pricing, and high-availability dispatch at scale. A comprehensive guide for system design interview preparation.

system-designlyftride-sharing

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System Design: Google Maps

Learn how to design Google Maps — covering map tile serving, routing algorithms, real-time traffic, and search at planetary scale. A must-read for senior engineering interviews.

system-designgoogle-mapsrouting

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System Design: Waze Navigation

Design Waze's community-driven navigation system covering real-time incident crowdsourcing, map editing pipelines, and social routing at scale. Ideal for system design interview practice.

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System Design: Ride Matching Algorithm

A detailed breakdown of designing a real-time ride matching system — covering geospatial indexing, ETA computation, ranking algorithms, and multi-constraint optimization for ride-hailing platforms.

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System Design: Driver Dispatch System

Deep dive into designing a driver dispatch system for ride-hailing or delivery platforms — covering state machines, offer workflows, real-time communication, and fault tolerance.

system-designdispatchdriver-management

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System Design: Real-Time GPS Tracking

Learn how to build a real-time GPS tracking system for fleets, deliveries, or assets — covering high-frequency location ingestion, live map updates, geofencing, and time-series storage.

system-designgps-trackingreal-time

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System Design: Route Optimization Engine

Design a route optimization engine for logistics and delivery platforms — covering vehicle routing problems, constraint solving, real-time re-optimization, and scalable architecture.

system-designroute-optimizationlogistics

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System Design: Fleet Management System

Design a comprehensive fleet management platform covering vehicle tracking, maintenance scheduling, driver behavior analytics, and compliance reporting at scale.

system-designfleet-managementiot

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System Design: Carpooling Platform

Design a carpooling platform that matches commuters sharing similar routes — covering route similarity algorithms, scheduling, trust mechanisms, and real-time coordination.

system-designcarpoolingmatching

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System Design: Logistics & Package Tracking

Design a package tracking system for logistics carriers — covering scan event ingestion, status aggregation, customer notifications, and carrier API integration at scale.

system-designlogisticspackage-tracking

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System Design: Last-Mile Delivery System

Design a last-mile delivery system for e-commerce and grocery platforms — covering dynamic dispatch, driver tracking, proof of delivery, and failed delivery handling.

system-designlast-mile-deliverylogistics

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System Design: EV Charging Network

Design the backend for an EV charging network covering charger availability, session management, payment processing, load balancing, and smart grid integration.

system-designev-chargingiot

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System Design: Bike/Scooter Sharing Platform

Design a dockless bike and scooter sharing system covering IoT vehicle management, lock/unlock mechanics, geofencing, dynamic pricing, and fleet rebalancing operations.

system-designmicromobilitybike-sharing

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System Design: Airbnb

Design Airbnb's home rental marketplace covering listing search, booking calendar management, payment processing, and review systems at global scale.

system-designairbnbmarketplace

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System Design: Booking.com

Design Booking.com's accommodation marketplace covering multi-property search, rate/availability sync, and reservation management across millions of hotel partners.

system-designbooking-comhotel

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System Design: Flight Search System

Design a flight search system like Google Flights or Kayak covering fare data aggregation, complex itinerary search, price caching, and calendar-view cheapest-day computation.

system-designflight-searchgds

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System Design: Hotel Booking System

Design a hotel booking system covering inventory management, reservation consistency, rate plan complexity, and channel distribution at scale.

system-designhotel-bookinginventory

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System Design: Travel Recommendation Engine

Design a travel recommendation system that personalizes destination, accommodation, and activity suggestions based on user preferences, travel history, and collaborative filtering.

system-designrecommendationspersonalization

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System Design: Price Alert System (Travel)

Design a travel price alert system that monitors fares and sends timely notifications when prices drop below user-defined targets — covering efficient polling, fanout, and alert deduplication.

system-designprice-alertsnotifications

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System Design: Seat Selection & Reservation

Design a seat selection and reservation system for airlines or event venues — covering real-time seat map rendering, concurrent selection conflicts, and distributed locking strategies.

system-designseat-selectionreservations

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System Design: Travel Itinerary Planner

Design a travel itinerary planning application covering collaborative editing, attraction sequencing optimization, offline sync, and third-party integration.

system-designitinerary-plannercollaborative-editing

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System Design: Travel Review Platform

Design a travel review platform like TripAdvisor — covering review ingestion, ranking algorithms, fake review detection, and multi-language content serving.

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