System Design

⏱ 8 min read What Makes Stock Exchanges Hard to Design A stock exchange is one of the most demanding distributed systems: it must […] Read article

⏱ 8 min read Why Content Moderation Is a Hard Systems Problem A platform with 500 million daily active users generates billions of pieces Read article

⏱ 8 min read What Is an API Gateway? An API gateway is the single entry point for all client requests to a microservices Read article

⏱ 7 min read Analytics vs Transactional Systems OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) systems like PostgreSQL are optimized for short, frequent reads and writes to Read article

⏱ 8 min read Why Recommendations Matter Netflix reports that 80% of content watched is discovered through recommendations. Spotify generates 30% of its streams Read article

⏱ 8 min read Problem Overview Design a hotel or short-term rental booking system like Airbnb or Booking.com. Users search for available properties in Read article

⏱ 8 min read Why Payment Systems Are Hard Payment systems are among the hardest distributed systems to design because money movement requires exactly-once Read article

⏱ 8 min read Problem Overview Design a location-based service that allows users to find nearby businesses (Yelp) or navigate between locations (Google Maps). Read article

⏱ 7 min read Problem Overview Design a file storage and sync service like Dropbox or Google Drive. Users can upload files up to Read article

⏱ 8 min read What Is a Web Crawler? A web crawler (spider) systematically browses the web, downloading pages and extracting links to discover Read article

⏱ 7 min read What Is a CDN? A Content Delivery Network is a globally distributed network of servers (Points of Presence, or PoPs) Read article

⏱ 7 min read The Core Challenge Real-time collaborative editing requires multiple users to edit the same document simultaneously and see each other changes Read article

⏱ 7 min read What Is a Typeahead System? A typeahead (search autocomplete) system returns a ranked list of query completions as the user Read article

⏱ 8 min read Problem Overview Design a leaderboard and matchmaking system for a multiplayer game with 50 million players. The leaderboard shows global Read article

⏱ 8 min read IoT system design is increasingly common at Amazon (AWS IoT), Google (Cloud IoT), Tesla, Nest, and any company building connected Read article