System Design Interview: Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture
Why Multi-Region Active-Active? A single-region active-passive setup (one primary region serves traffic, one standby region for failover) has two problems: […]
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: Global Content Delivery and Edge Computing
Beyond Basic CDN: Edge Computing A CDN (Content Delivery Network) has historically served static assets — images, CSS, JS —
System Design
System Design Interview: Kubernetes Autoscaling (HPA, VPA, KEDA, and Cluster Autoscaler)
Why Autoscaling? Manual capacity planning is expensive and error-prone. Too much capacity wastes money; too little causes outages under traffic
System Design
System Design Interview: Two-Phase Commit and Distributed Transactions
The Distributed Transaction Problem A transaction that spans multiple databases or services must either fully commit on all participants or
System Design
System Design Interview: Data Warehouse and OLAP Architecture
What Is a Data Warehouse? A data warehouse (DW) is an analytical database optimized for reading large volumes of historical
System Design
System Design Interview: Service Mesh and Microservice Communication
What Is a Service Mesh? A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication in a microservices
System Design
System Design Interview: Raft Consensus Algorithm Deep Dive
Why Consensus Matters Distributed systems need to agree on values — which server is the primary, what the current config
System Design
System Design Interview: Zero-Downtime Deployments
Why Zero-Downtime Deployments Planned downtime windows are increasingly unacceptable — global users span every time zone, and even brief outages
System Design
System Design Interview: Serverless Architecture and Function-as-a-Service
What Is Serverless? Serverless (Function-as-a-Service / FaaS) lets you deploy individual functions without managing servers. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions,
System Design
System Design Interview: GraphQL API at Scale
Why GraphQL for Large APIs GraphQL solves two fundamental REST API problems: over-fetching (the response includes fields the client doesn’t
System Design
System Design Interview: Machine Learning Training Infrastructure
Why ML Training Infrastructure Is a System Design Interview Topic Companies building AI products at scale — OpenAI, Google, Meta,
System Design
System Design Interview: Event Sourcing and CQRS
What Is Event Sourcing? Traditional systems store the current state of data (the latest balance in a bank account, the
System Design
System Design Interview: Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture
What Is a Multi-Tenant Architecture? Multi-tenancy means a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers (tenants), with each
System Design
System Design Interview: Database Replication and High Availability
Why Database Replication? A single database server is a single point of failure. Replication copies data from a primary (write)
System Design
System Design Interview: Real-Time Bidding Platform (Ad Exchange)
The global programmatic advertising market is $500B. Every time a web page loads, a real-time auction runs in under 100