System Design — Page 8 of 21
Browsing page 8 of 21 — 243 articles on system design.
Designing an Error Tracking System: Exception Grouping, Stack Trace Fingerprinting, and Intelligent Alerting at Scale
How production error tracking systems work under the hood: event ingestion pipelines, stack trace parsing with source map resolution, fingerprinting algorithms that group thousands of identical exceptions, release-aware regression detection, and intelligent alerting with spike detection.
Designing a Durable Execution Engine: Workflow Replay, Checkpointing, and Failure Recovery for Long-Running Distributed Processes
A deep dive into the replay-based execution model used by durable execution frameworks. Covers event sourcing of workflow steps, deterministic constraints, checkpointing strategies, saga compensation, and exactly-once side effects with TypeScript examples.
Designing a Recommendation Engine: Collaborative Filtering, Content-Based Ranking, and Real-Time Personalization at Scale
A production architecture guide covering collaborative filtering, content-based ranking, hybrid pipelines, embedding-based ANN search, cold-start strategies, and low-latency serving for recommendation systems at scale.
Designing a Real-Time Chat System: Message Ordering, Delivery Guarantees, and Presence Management at Scale
A deep dive into the engineering decisions behind real-time chat systems, covering message ordering with hybrid logical clocks, at-least-once delivery with client-side deduplication, presence detection, group chat fan-out, and WebSocket routing across distributed server instances.
Designing a Social Graph: Storage Models, Traversal Queries, and Mutual Connection Discovery at Scale
A deep dive into social graph system design covering adjacency list storage in relational vs graph databases, bidirectional vs unidirectional edges, efficient mutual-friend and friend-of-friend queries, hot-path caching for recommendations, and fan-out implications for feeds and notifications.
Designing an Agent Identity and Access System: Credential Scoping, Token Lifecycle, and Least-Privilege Enforcement for Production AI Agents
Per-agent scoped credentials, just-in-time token issuance, credential broker architecture, and OWASP Agentic Top 10 mitigations for production AI agent systems. With TypeScript implementations.
Designing a Unique ID Generator: UUIDs, ULIDs, Snowflake IDs, and Database Sequences for Distributed Systems
A practical guide to the four main approaches for generating unique identifiers in distributed systems: auto-incrementing sequences, UUIDs (v4 and v7), ULIDs, and Snowflake-style IDs. Covers TypeScript implementations, sortability, collision probability, index fragmentation, clock skew, and migration strategies.
Database Concurrency Control in Practice: Isolation Levels, Locking Strategies, and MVCC for Production Systems
A practical guide to database concurrency control covering the four SQL isolation levels with real anomaly examples, how MVCC works in Postgres and MySQL, optimistic vs pessimistic locking patterns with TypeScript code, and concrete guidance for double-spending prevention, inventory reservation, and financial ledgers.
Designing a Code Execution Sandbox: Container Isolation, Resource Limits, and Secure Multi-Tenant Code Running at Scale
A system design deep dive into building a secure code execution sandbox for online judges, AI agent tool execution, and developer playgrounds. Covers container isolation levels, language-level sandboxing, resource limiting with cgroups, execution lifecycle, multi-tenant scheduling, and output streaming.
Designing a News Feed System: Fan-Out Strategies, Ranking Algorithms, and Real-Time Updates at Scale
A deep dive into news feed system design covering push vs pull fan-out models, hybrid celebrity handling, feed ranking, real-time delivery with SSE and WebSockets, Redis sorted set timelines, and cache invalidation patterns for materialized feeds.
Designing a Bidirectional Data Sync Engine: Conflict Resolution, Change Detection, and Multi-System Consistency at Scale
How to build the infrastructure that keeps data consistent across your application and multiple external systems. Covers change detection, conflict resolution with vector clocks, tombstone handling, idempotent sync operations, and error recovery in multi-system updates.
Reliability Engineering for Multi-Agent Pipelines: Compound Failure Math, Redundancy Patterns, and SLO Budgets at Scale
When 10 agents each run at 95% reliability, the pipeline delivers 60%. When each step in a 10-step task has 85% success, the pipeline succeeds 19.7% of the time. This article covers compound failure math, redundancy patterns, SLO budget allocation, and monitoring strategies for multi-agent systems in production.