System Design — Page 14 of 21
Browsing page 14 of 21 — 243 articles on system design.
Designing a Load Shedding System: Priority Queues, Admission Control, and Graceful Degradation Under Extreme Traffic
A production guide to load shedding in distributed systems: why it differs from rate limiting, priority-based admission control with request classification, token bucket and weighted fair queuing implementations in TypeScript, circuit breaker integration, client cooperation, observability for shedding decisions, and the tradeoffs that matter in production.
Designing a Multi-Tenant Data Export Pipeline: Bulk Exports, Streaming Downloads, and Rate-Limited Delivery for SaaS Products
A practical system design guide for building data export pipelines in multi-tenant SaaS products. Covers queue architecture, chunked processing, streaming delivery, presigned URLs, tenant-level rate limiting, progress tracking, and GDPR compliance.
Designing a Reservation and Booking System: Availability Windows, Double-Booking Prevention, and Calendar Synchronization at Scale
A deep-dive system design guide covering availability window modeling, optimistic vs pessimistic locking, iCal/Google Calendar sync, timezone handling, waitlists, overbooking strategies, and horizontal scaling patterns for production reservation systems.
Designing an API Composition Layer: Aggregating Microservices, Handling Partial Failures, and Optimizing Client-Server Communication
When clients call five services to render one screen, the composition problem is architectural. This article covers the API composition pattern: parallel fan-out, partial failure handling with degraded responses, caching at the composition layer, and when to use BFF or GraphQL federation instead.
Designing an Inventory Management System: Stock Reservations, Consistency Under Concurrent Writes, and Oversell Prevention at Scale
A deep-dive into inventory system design for e-commerce and marketplace engineers: data models, soft vs hard reservations with TTLs, optimistic locking, CAS operations, distributed warehouses, and the consistency vs availability tradeoff.
Designing a Distributed Task Queue: Priority Scheduling, Worker Pools, and Exactly-Once Processing
How to architect a distributed task queue from scratch. Covers priority scheduling, worker pool management, exactly-once processing via idempotency, dead letter queues, backpressure, and horizontal scaling, with concrete tradeoffs between Redis, Postgres, and dedicated systems.
Designing a KYC and Identity Verification Pipeline: Document Processing, Liveness Detection, and Risk Scoring at Scale
KYC pipelines fail in predictable ways: manual review bottlenecks, inconsistent risk decisions, PII leaking through logging, and async job state that diverges from webhook status. This guide covers the full architecture of a production-grade identity verification system, from document OCR and liveness detection to risk scoring, PII encryption, and the build-vs-buy tradeoff with providers like Jumio, Onfido, and Persona.
Designing a Real-Time Geolocation System: Spatial Indexing, Proximity Queries, and Location Streaming at Scale
A deep-dive into building production-grade real-time geolocation systems covering spatial indexing with geohashes and R-trees, proximity queries, PostGIS vs Redis geospatial, WebSocket location streaming, geofencing, update storm handling, and horizontal scaling strategies.
Designing an Embedded Finance Platform: Double-Entry Ledgers, Payment Rail Orchestration, and Multi-Provider Settlement at Scale
How to architect embedded finance systems inside SaaS products, covering double-entry ledger design, payment rail selection across Stripe and Adyen, multi-currency settlement, idempotent money movement, reconciliation pipelines, and a build-vs-buy tradeoffs table for each component.
Designing a Data Mesh Architecture: Domain Ownership, Self-Serve Data Infrastructure, and Federated Governance at Scale
A practical guide to data mesh architecture for senior engineers: how domain ownership, data as a product, self-serve infrastructure, and federated governance replace the centralized data team bottleneck. Covers data contracts, schema registry design in TypeScript, comparison with data lake and warehouse approaches, and when data mesh is overkill.
Designing a Distributed Configuration Service: Dynamic Toggles, Hierarchical Overrides, and Consistency at Scale
A deep dive into building a centralized configuration service for distributed microservices. Covers hierarchical config resolution, consistency models, change propagation, versioning, rollback, audit trails, and how config drift silently breaks production.
Designing a Webhook Delivery System: Reliable Outbound Events, Retry Logic, and Endpoint Management at Scale
A production-grade webhook delivery system is harder than it looks. This guide covers event queuing, at-least-once delivery guarantees, exponential backoff with jitter, dead letter queues, HMAC signing, replay protection, per-endpoint rate limiting, observability, and scaling the delivery pipeline.