System Design — Page 10 of 21
Browsing page 10 of 21 — 243 articles on system design.
Designing a Secure MCP Server: Authentication, Tenant Isolation, and Transport Hardening for Production Model Context Protocol Integrations
MCP explicitly defers security to the implementer. That means every registered tool is an authorization boundary you own. This guide covers authentication patterns, tenant isolation strategies that prevent Asana-class data leakage, input validation, rate limiting, and transport hardening for production MCP deployments.
Designing a Soft-Delete and Data Lifecycle System: Tombstones, Retention Windows, and Undo Workflows for Multi-Tenant SaaS
A deep dive into production soft-delete architecture: tombstone patterns, cascading deletes, retention window policies, undo workflows with referential integrity, unique constraint handling, query performance at scale, multi-tenant isolation, and GDPR right-to-erasure conflicts.
Designing an E-Commerce Order System: Cart Management, Checkout Orchestration, and Fulfillment Workflows at Scale
A practical guide to e-commerce order system design covering cart state management, multi-step checkout orchestration, order state machines, fulfillment workflows, and the consistency challenges of coordinating payment, inventory, and order services.
Designing a Tenant Data Import System: File Parsing, Schema Mapping, and Error Recovery for SaaS Onboarding at Scale
Every SaaS product eventually has to let customers bring their own data. This guide covers the full architecture: streaming file parsing, intelligent column mapping, validation pipelines, background processing with progress tracking, error recovery strategies, idempotency for resumed imports, and multi-tenant concurrency.
Designing an Agent Gateway: Centralized Routing, Lifecycle Management, and Fleet Observability for Production AI Agent Systems
Most teams manage AI agents the way early SaaS teams managed microservices: one at a time, by hand, until something breaks. This guide covers the architecture of a centralized agent gateway, including agent registration, typed routing, permission boundary enforcement, token budget enforcement at the gateway layer, and fleet-wide observability.
Designing an Event Ticketing System: Seat Inventory, Flash Sale Concurrency, and Bot Mitigation at Scale
A production-focused walkthrough of event ticketing system design covering seat map data modeling, TTL-based inventory holds, distributed and optimistic locking under flash sale concurrency, payment timeout coordination, bot mitigation strategies, and dynamic pricing tradeoffs.
Designing a Virtual Waiting Room: Fair Queuing, Position Tracking, and Capacity-Gated Access for High-Demand Systems
A deep dive into virtual waiting room system design: distributed queue management, FIFO with jitter resistance, real-time position tracking without global locks, capacity-gated admission, bot detection, and production failure modes including clock skew and refresh-on-position-loss.
The Modular Monolith: Vertical Slices, Bounded Contexts, and Module Boundaries in TypeScript
A practical guide to structuring a TypeScript backend as a modular monolith. Covers bounded context design, vertical slice architecture, enforcing module isolation at the code level, inter-module communication via events, and the concrete signals that justify extracting a module into a separate service.
Designing a Live Commerce Platform: Real-Time Bidding, Inventory Reservation, and Multi-Channel Product Sync at Scale
Live commerce platforms combine the worst concurrency problems from flash sales, real-time auctions, and multi-channel inventory sync into a single user session. This guide covers the backend architecture: WebSocket fan-out for bidding, pessimistic reservation under concurrent viewer load, multi-channel catalog sync across TikTok Shop and Instagram, and edge-rendered shoppable video.
Designing a Multi-Region Architecture: Data Replication, Failover Strategies, and Latency Optimization for Global Applications
A practitioner's guide to multi-region architecture covering active-active vs active-passive deployments, database replication strategies, DNS-based routing, edge caching, failover automation, and the production pitfalls most teams hit when going global.
Supervisory Engineering for Agentic Systems: Human Oversight Architecture That Prevents the 40% Cancellation Rate
Gartner projects 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027. This article breaks down supervisory engineering: the five oversight layers, a TypeScript supervisory orchestration implementation, and a comparison of supervision architectures for teams deploying autonomous agents in production.
Designing a Distributed Job Queue: Task Scheduling, Worker Pools, and Delivery Guarantees at Scale
A system design deep-dive into building a distributed job queue from scratch. Covers core components, scheduling strategies, at-least-once vs exactly-once delivery, worker pool management, failure handling, and horizontal scaling patterns with TypeScript examples.