Exploring the architecture behind large-scale distributed systems. Learn about load balancers, caching strategies, database sharding, CDNs, and the fascinating engineering challenges of building systems that handle billions of requests daily.
After a long break, I'm back! In this first blog post about system design interview preparation, I explore the high-level architecture of a Twitter-like social network. Learn about load balancers,...
Continuing our system design series, we dive into building a YouTube-like video platform. Learn about object storage, asynchronous processing, CDNs, video chunking, and how YouTube's architecture evolved from a simple...
Explore the architecture behind a web-scale search engine capable of indexing 100 billion pages. Learn about distributed crawlers, URL frontiers, inverted indexes, sharded databases, and the fascinating engineering challenges of...
Ever wondered how ride-sharing platforms like Uber handle millions of users, match riders with drivers in seconds, and track locations in real-time? In this deep dive, we'll explore a scalable...
Ever wondered how messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram handle billions of messages daily while maintaining instant delivery and end-to-end encryption? In this deep dive, I explore the architecture behind...
How do services like Dropbox and Google Drive store petabytes of data while keeping files synchronized across millions of devices in real-time? In this comprehensive deep dive, I explore the...
Designing an ad click event aggregation system at Facebook or Google scale. Learn about real-time bidding, stream processing, exactly-once semantics, and how to handle billions of clicks per day with...
Designing a scalable hotel booking system at scale. Learn about inventory management, concurrency control, distributed transactions, and how to handle hundreds of thousands of bookings per day with data integrity...
A comprehensive guide to designing a real-time gaming leaderboard: from clarifying requirements and back-of-the-envelope estimation to Redis Sorted Sets, a seven-step event-driven pipeline (Kafka, throttle, checksum, WebSocket), scaling with sharding,...
How to design a payment backend for e-commerce: pay-in and pay-out, using a payment provider (PSP), double-entry bookkeeping, hosted payment pages, and how to avoid double charges when things fail...
Rate limiting is one of those problems that sounds simple until you try to build it at scale. Five algorithms, each with real trade-offs. Distributed challenges like race conditions and...
When you add or remove a server in a distributed cache, traditional hashing forces nearly every key to move to a different server — causing cache storms and cascading failures....