System Design — Page 19 of 21
Browsing page 19 of 21 — 243 articles on system design.
The Circuit Breaker Pattern: Preventing Cascading Failures in Distributed Systems
A production guide to the circuit breaker pattern: state machine mechanics, sliding-window failure tracking, TypeScript implementation from scratch, integration with retries and timeouts, observability, tuning thresholds, partial circuits, and comparison with bulkhead and retry patterns.
Database Indexing Strategies: B-Trees, Hash Indexes, and Composite Keys for Production Performance
Most engineers know indexes speed up queries. Few understand why composite key ordering matters, when partial indexes beat full ones, or how write amplification erodes the gains. This guide covers the internals and the production tradeoffs.
Designing a Payment Processing System: Idempotency, Reconciliation, and Webhook Reliability at Scale
Payment systems look simple until you hit your first double-charge incident. This guide covers the full architecture of a production payment system, including state machines, idempotency patterns, double-entry ledgers, reconciliation pipelines, webhook reliability, PCI scope reduction, and multi-provider failover.
Designing a Permission System: RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC for Multi-Tenant SaaS
Most permission systems start simple and become unmaintainable. This guide covers RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC with TypeScript implementations, multi-tenant isolation patterns, caching strategies, and how to migrate between models without breaking production.
Designing a Real-Time Analytics Pipeline: Streaming Ingestion, Aggregation, and Dashboards at Scale
Batch ETL breaks down the moment your stakeholders want answers in seconds, not hours. This guide covers the full architecture of a real-time analytics pipeline: streaming ingestion with Kafka, windowed aggregation with exactly-once semantics, time-series storage choices, materialized views for dashboards, and backpressure handling in production.
Designing a Search Autocomplete System: Tries, Prefix Indexes, and Ranking at Scale
Search autocomplete feels trivial until you have to serve it at 99th-percentile latency under real traffic. This guide covers the full design: tries, weighted prefix trees, distributed storage, ranking signals, the read and write paths, caching layers, and the tradeoffs that matter in production.
Write-Ahead Logs: How Databases Guarantee Durability and Crash Recovery
A deep technical guide to write-ahead logging: sequential write mechanics, fsync semantics, checkpointing, log compaction, how Postgres, SQLite, and Kafka each implement WAL differently, crash recovery sequences, and production considerations around disk I/O, WAL size, and replication.
Consistent Hashing Explained: How Distributed Systems Balance Load Without Coordination
Naive modular hashing falls apart the moment you add or remove a node. Consistent hashing solves this with a ring structure and virtual nodes. Here is how it works, why it matters, and how to implement it in TypeScript.
CQRS in Practice: Separating Reads and Writes for Scalable Systems
A practical guide to the CQRS pattern: when it genuinely helps, TypeScript implementation patterns, handling eventual consistency, the relationship with event sourcing, and production considerations for debugging and migration.
Database Sharding Strategies: Horizontal Partitioning for Scale
Single-database architectures eventually hit a ceiling that no hardware upgrade can fix. This guide covers hash-based, range-based, directory-based, and geo-based sharding with TypeScript and PostgreSQL examples, shard key selection, cross-shard queries, resharding, and a decision framework for when sharding is actually the right call.
Designing a File Upload Pipeline: Presigned URLs, Chunked Uploads, and Processing at Scale
Most file upload implementations start as a simple POST endpoint and collapse under real production load. This article covers the full architecture: presigned URLs for direct-to-storage uploads, chunked and resumable transfers for large files, virus scanning, async processing pipelines, CDN delivery, and the failure modes that surface at scale.
Designing a Multi-Tenant SaaS Backend: Isolation Strategies, Schema Design, and Scaling Patterns
A practical guide to the three multi-tenancy isolation models: silo, bridge, and pool. Covers schema design, tenant context propagation, noisy neighbor prevention, connection pooling, and a decision framework for SaaS teams choosing between them.