System Design — Page 13 of 21
Browsing page 13 of 21 — 243 articles on system design.
Designing a Tenant Provisioning System: Automated Onboarding, Resource Allocation, and Namespace Isolation for Multi-Tenant SaaS
Manual tenant setup is a ticking clock for SaaS teams. This article covers the full system design of automated tenant provisioning: schema isolation, resource quotas, async workflows, rollback, and observability.
Designing an Autoscaling System: Metrics-Driven Scaling, Cooldown Policies, and Predictive Capacity Planning
A deep dive into how autoscaling systems work at the infrastructure level. Covers reactive scaling, step and target-tracking policies, cooldown and flapping prevention, predictive and scheduled scaling, Kubernetes HPA and VPA, serverless differences, and the real cost tradeoffs of over-provisioning.
The Raft Consensus Protocol: Leader Election, Log Replication, and Safety Guarantees in Distributed Systems
A deep-dive into how Raft achieves distributed consensus through term-based leader election, log replication with majority quorums, and strict safety properties. Covers Raft vs Paxos, split-brain prevention, and how etcd, CockroachDB, and Consul use it in production.
Designing a Data Anonymization Pipeline: PII Detection, Tokenization, and Privacy-Preserving Analytics at Scale
Building a production-grade data anonymization system requires more than regex replacements. This guide covers PII detection with NER and rule engines, tokenization strategies including format-preserving encryption, k-anonymity vs differential privacy tradeoffs, and how to maintain analytical utility while satisfying GDPR and CCPA requirements.
Designing a Pub/Sub Messaging System: Topic Partitioning, Consumer Groups, and Exactly-Once Delivery at Scale
A deep dive into the full architecture of a production pub/sub messaging system, covering partitioning strategies, consumer group rebalancing, delivery guarantees, and the hard operational problems teams run into after launch.
Designing a Time-Series Data Platform: Ingestion, Storage, and Query Patterns at Scale
A deep-dive into time-series data platform architecture covering ingestion pipelines, storage engine choices, query patterns, and a production comparison of TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, and InfluxDB.
Designing a Database Connection Pool: Connection Lifecycle, Pool Sizing, and Failover Strategies at Scale
A deep dive into how database connection pools work under the hood: connection lifecycle management, pool sizing formulas, common failure modes like connection leaks and thundering herd, and failover strategies for multi-region deployments.
Designing a Distributed File System: Metadata Servers, Chunk Replication, and Consistency Guarantees at Scale
A deep-dive into how distributed file systems like GFS and HDFS work under the hood: metadata server architecture, chunk replication strategies, lease-based mutation ordering, and the real tradeoffs between consistency and availability.
Designing a Real-Time Ad Serving System: Auction Mechanics, Targeting, and Budget Pacing at Scale
A deep-dive into building an ad serving platform covering RTB auction flow, second-price vs first-price auctions, user targeting, budget pacing algorithms, latency budgets under 100ms, and infrastructure for millions of bid requests per second.
Designing a Ride-Sharing Backend: Real-Time Matching, ETA Prediction, and Dynamic Pricing at Scale
A deep-dive into the backend architecture of a ride-sharing platform covering geospatial driver-rider matching with geohashing, graph-based ETA prediction with real-time traffic adjustment, surge pricing mechanics, and the distributed systems challenges behind high-throughput location streaming and state consistency.
Designing a Distributed Session Store: Replication, Partitioning, and Consistency for Stateful Web Applications
A deep dive into why distributed session state is hard, the tradeoffs between sticky sessions and shared stores, partitioning strategies, replication models, consistency guarantees, and production patterns using Redis Cluster, DynamoDB, and custom implementations.
Designing a Distributed Tracing System: Span Collection, Sampling Strategies, and Trace Storage at Scale
A system design deep-dive into building distributed tracing infrastructure from scratch. Covers the span data model, context propagation internals, head-based vs tail-based sampling, trace storage backends, and the tradeoffs between completeness and cost.