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System Design

Design scalable, reliable systems. Databases, networking, caching, real-world architectures, and interview preparation.

Browse 63 tutorials → Other topics

Why learn System Design?

  • The most important skill for senior engineering interviews.

  • Understanding how Netflix, Uber, and WhatsApp scale teaches you to build anything.

  • Covers databases, networking, caching, load balancing, and distributed systems.

  • Bridges the gap between writing code and designing production infrastructure.

What you can build with System Design

Senior engineering interviews Designing scalable architectures Database selection and optimization Distributed systems and microservices Real-world system analysis

System Design tutorials

63 articles · page 1 of 4

Hand-written tutorials, ordered as a recommended learning path.

  1. 01 What Is System Design? Understand what system design is, why it matters for engineers, the core building blocks of scalable systems, and how to approach system design interviews.
  2. 02 Caching Strategies Compare cache-aside, read-through, write-through, write-behind, and refresh-ahead. Learn when each strategy fits, what consistency you give up, and how to choose for interviews.
  3. 03 Database Sharding A practical introduction to sharding: range, hash, directory, and geo-based partitioning. Learn how to pick a shard key, handle hot shards, and plan resharding without downtime.
  4. 04 API Design Master API design with REST principles, GraphQL trade-offs, gRPC for microservices, pagination strategies, rate limiting, and authentication patterns. Learn why Stripe's API is the gold standard.
  5. 05 Database Replication Master database replication patterns — single-leader, multi-leader, and leaderless. Learn about replication lag, conflict resolution, quorum reads, and how Slack handles replication at scale.
  6. 06 Transactions & ACID Deep dive into ACID properties, isolation levels, and distributed transactions. Understand dirty reads, phantom reads, two-phase commit, the saga pattern, and how Stripe handles payment consistency.
  7. 07 Distributed Systems Understand what makes distributed systems hard. Learn consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft), leader election, distributed locking, vector clocks, gossip protocols, and how CockroachDB achieves distributed SQL.
  8. 08 Instagram Architecture How Instagram scaled Django to 2B+ users. Covers feed generation, image processing pipelines, Stories architecture, and PostgreSQL sharding strategies.
  9. 09 Microservices An honest look at microservices vs monoliths. Learn service communication, API gateways, database-per-service, distributed tracing, and how Amazon's migration shaped the industry.
  10. 10 Networking Basics Understand the networking stack from TCP/IP to HTTP/3. Learn DNS resolution, the TLS handshake, WebSockets vs SSE, and how CDNs reduce latency — all through practical analogies.
  11. 11 Netflix Architecture How Netflix evolved from DVD rental to a global streaming platform serving 250M+ subscribers. Covers microservices, Open Connect CDN, recommendations, and Chaos Engineering.
  12. 12 Scalability Patterns Master scalability patterns including horizontal scaling, stateless services, read replicas, CQRS, database partitioning, and async processing. See how Instagram handles 2B+ users.
  13. 13 Spotify Architecture How Spotify streams 100M+ songs to 600M+ users. Covers audio streaming, Discover Weekly ML, the squad/tribe model, event-driven architecture, and offline mode.
  14. 14 SQL vs NoSQL Compare relational and non-relational databases from first principles. Learn ACID properties, NoSQL types, polyglot persistence, and when to pick each — with real migration stories from Uber and Netflix.
  15. 15 Twitter/X Architecture How Twitter delivers 500M tweets/day to 300M+ timelines. Covers the fanout problem, hybrid push/pull, real-time search with EarlyBird, and the celebrity tweet challenge.
  16. 16 Uber Architecture How Uber matches millions of riders with drivers in real-time. Covers geospatial indexing with H3, surge pricing, ETA prediction, and their migration from Python to Go.
  17. 17 WhatsApp Architecture How WhatsApp served 2 billion users with just 50 engineers. Covers Erlang/BEAM concurrency, end-to-end encryption, message delivery, and extreme engineering efficiency.
  18. 18 YouTube Architecture How YouTube serves 1B+ hours of video per day. Covers the video upload pipeline, adaptive bitrate streaming, recommendation engine, and live streaming architecture.
  19. 19 Database Indexing Deep dive into database indexing — B-trees, hash indexes, composite indexes, covering indexes, partial indexes, and when each strategy wins or hurts performance.
  20. 20 Key-Value Store Design a distributed key-value store like DynamoDB or Redis Cluster. Covers partitioning, replication, consistency models, conflict resolution, and failure handling.