Case Studies System Designs
Worked Case Studies system design walkthroughs: the requirements, the trade-offs, real numbers and the component choices behind each design.
Ad Click Event Aggregation and Analytics Platform
End-to-end design of a high-throughput system that ingests billions of raw click events per day, aggregates them in near-real-time, and serves low-latency analytics queries for bidding and reporting.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Airbnb: Marketplace Search and Booking
End-to-end design of a global home-rental marketplace covering geo search, real-time availability, idempotent booking, and multi-region reliability at 100M+ listing scale.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Amazon Sales Ranking by Category
Design a real-time sales ranking system that computes and serves top-N product rankings per category at Amazon scale, handling millions of orders per day.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
API Rate Limiter: Case Study
Design a distributed rate limiter that enforces per-client request quotas at the edge with sub-millisecond overhead, supporting multiple algorithms and graceful degradation.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
Chat System Design (WhatsApp / Messenger Scale)
End-to-end design of a real-time messaging platform supporting 1B+ users, covering connection management, message routing, storage, and delivery guarantees.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
CI/CD Pipeline at Scale: Code Deployment System
End-to-end design of a production-grade CI/CD system handling thousands of daily deployments across hundreds of services, with progressive delivery and rollback guarantees.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Content Delivery Network (CDN) — Case Study
Design a globally distributed CDN like Cloudflare: edge PoPs, anycast routing, tiered caching, origin shield, and real-time purge — handling millions of requests per second.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Digital Wallet System Design
End-to-end architecture for a financial-grade digital wallet handling payments, transfers, and balance management at scale with strong consistency guarantees.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Cache: Memcached-Style Design
Design a horizontally scalable, low-latency distributed cache supporting sub-millisecond reads, consistent hashing, and graceful node failure — the core of systems like Memcached and Redis Cluster.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Email Service (Gmail-Scale)
End-to-end design of a Gmail-like email platform handling billions of messages, covering ingestion, storage, search, and delivery at global scale.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Job Scheduler: Cron at Scale
Design a fault-tolerant, horizontally scalable job scheduler that replaces single-node cron with exactly-once execution, sub-second dispatch latency, and millions of scheduled jobs.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Key-Value Store (Dynamo / Redis-like)
Design a fault-tolerant, low-latency distributed key-value store supporting millions of ops/sec, tunable consistency, and horizontal scaling across commodity hardware.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Lock Service
A fault-tolerant, low-latency distributed lock service built on a replicated consensus log, supporting TTL-based leases, fencing tokens, and multi-region failover.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Message Queue (Kafka-Style)
Design a fault-tolerant, high-throughput distributed log-based message queue supporting millions of messages per second, durable storage, consumer groups, and horizontal scaling.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Distributed Web Crawler System Design
A deep-dive into building a scalable, fault-tolerant web crawler capable of indexing billions of pages, covering URL frontier management, politeness, deduplication, and storage.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
E-Commerce Platform at Amazon Scale
End-to-end design of a high-throughput e-commerce platform handling product search, cart, checkout, payments, and order fulfillment at Amazon-like scale.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Facebook's Social Graph and Graph Search
Deep dive into how Facebook models billions of user relationships as a property graph, serves sub-second traversals, and powers ranked full-text graph search at planetary scale.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
File Sync and Sharing System (Dropbox / Google Drive)
Design a distributed file sync and sharing platform supporting billions of files, real-time delta sync, deduplication, and fine-grained access control at Dropbox/Google Drive scale.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Flight Booking System
End-to-end design of a flight search, reservation, and ticketing platform handling millions of searches and thousands of concurrent bookings with strong consistency on seat inventory.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
Food Delivery App System Design (DoorDash / Swiggy)
End-to-end architecture for a hyperlocal food delivery platform handling order placement, real-time dispatch, live tracking, and restaurant/menu management at scale.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
Google Maps: Distributed Geo-Spatial Navigation Platform
End-to-end design of a global mapping and navigation system covering tile serving, routing, real-time traffic, ETAs, and geo-search at Google scale.
Case Studies · advanced · 12 min read
Hotel Reservation System
End-to-end design of a hotel booking platform handling search, inventory management, payment, and confirmation at scale — covering data models, concurrency, and failure modes.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
Instagram Photo Sharing Platform
End-to-end design of a photo-sharing platform supporting 1B+ users, covering upload pipelines, feed generation, CDN delivery, and horizontal scaling strategies.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read
Load Balancer: Case Study
Design a production-grade load balancer from scratch: algorithms, health checking, session persistence, TLS termination, and failure handling at scale.
Case Studies · intermediate · 12 min read