System Design Interview: Music Streaming Service (Spotify)
Spotify serves 600M users, 100M tracks, and 9M daily podcast episodes. Designing a music streaming service covers audio delivery, catalog […]
System Design
System Design
Learn to design scalable, reliable systems that handle millions of users. System design interviews test your ability to architect real-world applications, considering tradeoffs, scalability, and best practices.
Core Topics:
Scalability: Load balancing, horizontal vs vertical scaling
Storage: Databases (SQL vs NoSQL), caching (Redis, Memcached)
Reliability: Replication, failover, disaster recovery
Performance: CDNs, caching strategies, database indexing
Common Design Questions:
Design URL shortener (bit.ly)
Design rate limiter
Design Twitter/Instagram feed
Design messaging system (WhatsApp)
Design file storage (Dropbox)
Interview Level: Senior engineers (L5+) at FAANG companies. Requires 3-5+ years experience to tackle effectively.
Preparation: Study system design patterns, understand distributed systems fundamentals, and practice mock interviews.
System Design
System Design Interview: Distributed Task Queue (Celery / SQS / Sidekiq)
A distributed task queue decouples work production from work execution. Instead of processing a request synchronously (blocking the HTTP response),
System Design
System Design Interview: Data Pipeline and ETL System (Airflow / Spark)
What Is a Data Pipeline? A data pipeline moves and transforms data from source systems (databases, APIs, event streams) to
System Design
System Design Interview: Microservices Architecture Patterns
Monolith vs Microservices A monolith deploys all application functionality as one unit. Simple to develop initially, but becomes harder to
System Design
System Design Interview: Monitoring and Observability Platform (Datadog)
The Three Pillars of Observability Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system from its external
System Design
System Design Interview: Configuration Management Service (etcd / Consul)
What Is a Configuration Management Service? A configuration management service stores application configuration (database connection strings, feature toggle values, service
System Design
System Design Interview: Feature Flag System (LaunchDarkly)
What Are Feature Flags? Feature flags (also called feature toggles or feature gates) decouple code deployment from feature release. A
System Design
System Design Interview: Distributed Lock Manager (Redis / Zookeeper)
Why Distributed Locks Are Needed In a distributed system, multiple instances of a service may run concurrently. When these instances
System Design
System Design Interview: Stock Exchange (NYSE / Nasdaq Order Book)
What Makes Stock Exchanges Hard to Design A stock exchange is one of the most demanding distributed systems: it must
System Design
System Design Interview: Content Moderation System (Instagram / YouTube)
Why Content Moderation Is a Hard Systems Problem A platform with 500 million daily active users generates billions of pieces
System Design
System Design Interview: Analytics Platform (ClickHouse / Snowflake Scale)
Analytics vs Transactional Systems OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) systems like PostgreSQL are optimized for short, frequent reads and writes to
System Design
System Design Interview: API Gateway (Kong / AWS API Gateway)
What Is an API Gateway? An API gateway is the single entry point for all client requests to a microservices
System Design
System Design Interview: Recommendation System (Netflix / Spotify)
Why Recommendations Matter Netflix reports that 80% of content watched is discovered through recommendations. Spotify generates 30% of its streams
System Design
System Design Interview: Hotel Booking System (Airbnb / Booking.com)
Problem Overview Design a hotel or short-term rental booking system like Airbnb or Booking.com. Users search for available properties in
System Design
System Design Interview: Payment Processing System (Stripe / PayPal)
Why Payment Systems Are Hard Payment systems are among the hardest distributed systems to design because money movement requires exactly-once