System Design — Page 11 of 21
Browsing page 11 of 21 — 243 articles on system design.
Designing a Recommendation System: Collaborative Filtering, Real-Time Scoring, and Feature Store Architecture
A full architecture walkthrough for production recommendation systems: candidate generation with collaborative filtering and content-based approaches, ML ranking with feature stores, a real-time serving layer with latency budgets, and production concerns including cold start, feedback loops, A/B testing, and drift detection.
Designing a Circuit Breaker: Failure Detection, State Machines, and Cascading Failure Prevention in Distributed Systems
A deep dive into circuit breaker design: the three-state machine mechanics, failure detection strategies, timeout calibration, the relationship with retry policies and bulkheads, and how to choose between library-level and infrastructure-level circuit breaking.
Designing a Customer Data Platform: Event Collection, Identity Resolution, and Unified Customer Profiles at Scale
A practical guide to the internal architecture of a customer data platform. Covers event collection SDKs, identity resolution algorithms, profile merge logic, audience segmentation, and GDPR right-to-deletion.
Designing a Data Retention and Archival System: TTL Policies, Cold Storage Tiers, and Compliance-Driven Data Lifecycle Management
Every production database grows until compliance or cost forces a rethink. This guide covers TTL policies, hot/warm/cold storage tiers with transparent query routing, GDPR/HIPAA/SOC2 retention rules, archival pipelines, and deletion that actually works.
Designing a Stock Exchange: Order Matching Engines, Order Books, and Low-Latency Trade Execution at Scale
A deep dive into stock exchange system design covering order book data structures, price-time and pro-rata matching algorithms, kernel bypass for sub-microsecond latency, multicast market data distribution, and the production challenges of deterministic replay, fault tolerance, and regulatory audit trails.
Designing a Webhook Ingestion Pipeline: Signature Verification, Idempotent Processing, and Event Routing for Multi-Provider SaaS
A practical guide to building a production webhook ingestion pipeline that handles signature verification across providers, deduplicates events, routes to internal consumers, and surfaces observability signals when a provider goes silent.
Designing a Rate Limiter: Token Buckets, Sliding Windows, and Distributed Rate Limiting at Scale
A deep dive into rate limiting algorithms, distributed coordination with Redis, per-user and per-API-key enforcement, and the production problems most implementations ignore: race conditions, clock drift, graceful degradation, and placement in the request path.
Cell-Based Architecture: Failure Isolation, Blast Radius Reduction, and Multi-Cell Routing at Scale
A practical guide to cell-based architecture: how to size cells, build routing layers, handle cross-cell data, deploy safely across cells, and decide whether the operational complexity is justified for your scale.
Designing a Calendar and Scheduling System: Availability Windows, Timezone Handling, and Recurring Events at Scale
A deep-dive into the backend architecture of a calendar and scheduling system. Covers data modeling for events and attendees, UTC-first timezone handling, RRULE-based recurrence, availability computation across multiple calendars, double-booking prevention, CalDAV sync, and scaling to millions of calendars.
Designing a Real-Time Feed System: Fan-Out Strategies, Activity Streams, and Personalized Timelines at Scale
How to architect a feed and timeline system from first principles. Covers fan-out-on-write vs fan-out-on-read tradeoffs, hybrid approaches for high-follower accounts, activity stream storage with denormalization, ranking and personalization layers, real-time push with WebSockets and SSE, cursor-based pagination, and cache warming strategies with TypeScript examples throughout.
Designing a WebRTC Backend: Signaling Servers, TURN Relays, and Scalable Peer Connection Management
WebRTC moves media between browsers without a server in the middle, but the backend infrastructure that makes it work reliably at scale is non-trivial. This covers signaling architecture, STUN/TURN deployment, SFU vs MCU topologies, room state machines, and fallback strategies.
Designing a Food Delivery Backend: Order Lifecycle, Driver Matching, and Real-Time ETA Updates at Scale
A deep-dive into food delivery system design covering the full order lifecycle, proximity-based driver matching with fairness constraints, graph-based ETA computation, surge pricing mechanics, and the distributed systems challenges that show up when order state and driver state need to stay consistent under failure.