System Design Resources

These are the best resources for System Design on the Internet.

1. Video Processing

• Transcoding Videos at Scale: https://www.egnyte.com/blog/2018/12/transcoding-how-we-serve-videos-at-scale/

• Facebook Video Broadcasting: https://engineering.fb.com/ios/under-the-hood-broadcasting-live-video-to-millions/

• Netflix Video Encoding at Scale: https://netflixtechblog.com/high-quality-video-encoding-at-scale-d159db052746

• Netflix Shot based encoding: https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-now-streaming-4b9464204830

2. Cluster and Workflow Management

• Facebook Cluster Management: https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/twine/

• Google Autopilot - Autoscaling: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3342195.3387524

• Netflix Workflow Orchestration: https://netflix.github.io/conductor/

• Opensource Workflow Management: https://github.com/spotify/luigi

• Meta Hardware Management: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/12/09/data-center-engineering/how-facebook-keeps-its-large-scale-infrastructure-hardware-up-and-running/

3. Intra-Service Messaging

• What is a message queue: https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/what-is-message-queuing.html

• AirBnb Idempotency: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/avoiding-double-payments-in-a-distributed-payments-system-2981f6b070bb

• Nginx Service Mesh: https://www.nginx.com/learn/service-mesh/

4. Message Queue Antipattern

• DB as queue Antipattern: http://blog.codepath.com/2012/11/15/asynchronous-processing-in-web-applications-part-1-a-database-is-not-a-queue/

• Using a database as a message queue: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/231410/why-database-as-queue-so-bad

• Anti-pattern of DB as a queue: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/04/database-as-queue-anti-pattern.html

• Drawbacks of DB as a queue: https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/why-is-a-database-not-the-right-tool-for-a-queue-based-system.html

5. Service Mesh

• Kubernetes Service Mesh: https://akomljen.com/kubernetes-service-mesh/

• Kubernetes Sidecar:https://www.weave.works/blog/introduction-to-service-meshes-on-kubernetes-and-progressive-delivery

• Service Mesh: https://www.weave.works/blog/introduction-to-service-meshes-on-kubernetes-and-progressive-delivery

• NginX Service Mesh: https://www.nginx.com/learn/service-mesh/

6. Practical System Design

• Facebook Messenger Optimisations: https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-facebooks-software-engineers-prepare-messenger-for-new-years-eve

• YouTube Architecture: http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

• YouTube scalability 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5WVu624fY8

• Distributed Design Patterns: http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/10/scalable-system-design-patterns.html

• Monolith to Microservice: https://martinfowler.com/articles/break-monolith-into-microservices.html

7. Distributed File System

• Open Source Distributed File System: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/architecture/

• Amazon S3 Performance hacks: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks-seattle-hiring-event/

• Amazon S3 object expiration: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-object-expiration/

8. Time Series Databases

• Pintrest Time Series Database: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/goku-building-a-scalable-and-high-performant-time-series-database-system-a8ff5758a181

• Uber Time Series DB: https://eng.uber.com/aresdb/

• TimeSeries Relational DB: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/time-series-data-why-and-how-to-use-a-relational-database-instead-of-nosql-d0cd6975e87c/

• Facebook Gorilla Time Series DB: http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf

9. Rate Limiting

• Circuit Breaker Algorithm: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html

• Uber Rate Limiter: https://github.com/uber-go/ratelimit/blob/master/ratelimit.go

10. Network Protocols

• What is HTTP: https://engineering.cred.club/head-of-line-hol-blocking-in-http-1-and-http-2-50b24e9e3372

• QUIC Protocol: https://www.akamai.com/blog/performance/http3-and-quic-past-present-and-future

• TCP Protocol algorithms: https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf (First 10 pages are important)

• WebRTC: https://webrtc.github.io/webrtc-org/blog/2012/07/23/a-great-introduction-to-webrtc.html

• WebSockets: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6455#section-1.2

11. Chess Engine Design

• Chess Engine Building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ogK0MIzqk

12. Subscription Management System

• Subscription Manager: https://netflixtechblog.com/building-a-rule-based-platform-to-manage-netflix-membership-skus-at-scale-e3c0f82aa7bc

13. Google Docs

• Operational Transform: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applying-operational-transformation

• Google Docs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOFzWZrsPV0&list=PLXDe3d8o9VFtydBV5biyz9iS3WqKsBMD5&index=3

14. API Design

• API Design: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/building-services-at-airbnb-part-1-c4c1d8fa811b

• Swagger APIs: https://swagger.io/docs/specification/about/

15. NoSQL Database Internals

• Cassandra Architecture: https://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/3.0/cassandra/architecture/archIntro.html

• Google BigTable Architecture: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf

• Amazon Dynamo DB Internals: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html

• Design Patterns in Amazon Dynamo DB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaEPXoXVf2k

• Internals of Amazon Dynamo DB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvBR71D0nAQ

16. NoSQL Database Algorithms

• Hyperloglog Algorithm: https://odino.org/my-favorite-data-structure-hyperloglog/

• Log Structured Merge Tree: https://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/lsmtree.pdf

• Sorted String Tables and Compaction Strategies: https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/wiki/SSTable-compaction-and-compaction-strategies

• Leveled Compaction Cassandra: https://www.datastax.com/blog/leveled-compaction-apache-cassandra

• Scylla DB Compaction: https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/wiki/SSTable-compaction-and-compaction-strategies

• Indexing in Cassandra: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cassandra-clustering-columns-partition-composite-key/

17. Database Replication

• Database replication: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/replication.html

• Netflix Data replication - Change Data Capture: https://netflixtechblog.com/dblog-a-generic-change-data-capture-framework-69351fb9099b

• LinkedIn Logging Usecases: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

18. Containers and Docker

• Facebook Twine Containerization: https://engineering.fb.com/developer-tools/zookeeper-twine/

• CloudFlare Containerization: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containers/

• Docker Architecture: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/#docker-architecture

19. Capacity Estimation

• Google Capacity Estimation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI

• Scalability at YouTube 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok

• Back of envelope Calculations at AWS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3qetLv2Yp0

• Capacity Estimation: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//people/jeff/stanford-295-talk.pdf

20. Publisher Subscriber

• Oracle Publisher Subscriber: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10501_01/appdev.920/a96590/adg15pub.htm

• Amazon Pub Sub Messaging: https://aws.amazon.com/pub-sub-messaging/

• Asynchronous processing: http://blog.codepath.com/2013/01/06/asynchronous-processing-in-web-applications-part-2-developers-need-to-understand-message-queues/

• Async Request Response: https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/conversation/RequestResponse.html

21. Event Driven Architectures

• Martin Fowler- Event Driven Architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STKCRSUsyP0

• Event Driven Architecture: https://martinfowler.com/articles/201701-event-driven.html

22. Hexagonal Architectures

• Hexagonal Architecture: https://netflixtechblog.com/ready-for-changes-with-hexagonal-architecture-b315ec967749

23. Microservices

• Monolith Architecture: https://buttercms.com/books/microservices-for-startups/should-you-always-start-with-a-monolith/

• Monoliths vs Microservices: https://articles.microservices.com/monolithic-vs-microservices-architecture-5c4848858f59

• Microservices: http://highscalability.com/blog/2018/4/5/do-you-have-too-many-microservices-five-design-attributes-th.html

• Uber Nanoservices antipattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY

• Uber Domain oriented microservice: https://eng.uber.com/microservice-architecture/

24. Load Balancing

• Load Balancer with Sticky Sessions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10494431/sticky-and-non-sticky-sessions

• Citrix what is load balancing: https://www.citrix.com/en-in/solutions/app-delivery-and-security/load-balancing/what-is-load-balancing.html

• Nginx Load Balancing: https://www.nginx.com/resources/glossary/load-balancing/

• Consistent hashing: https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/consistent-hashing/

25. Alerts and Anomaly Detection

• Outlier Detection: https://towardsdatascience.com/outlier-detection-with-isolation-forest-3d190448d45e

• Anomaly Detection: https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-for-anomaly-detection-and-condition-monitoring-d4614e7de770

• Uber Real Time Monitoring and Root Cause Analysis Argos: https://eng.uber.com/argos-real-time-alerts/

• Microsoft Anomaly Detection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Xq9OLdQwQ&t=0s

• Facebook Data Engineering: https://engineering.fb.com/2016/05/09/core-data/introducing-fblearner-flow-facebook-s-ai-backbone/

• LinkedIn Real Time Alerting: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/06/smart-alerts-in-thirdeye--linkedins-real-time-monitoring-platfor

• LinkedIn Isolation Forests: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/isolation-forest

26. Distributed Logging

• Uber Distributed Request Tracing: https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

• Pintrest Logging: https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/open-sourcing-singer-pinterests-performant-and-reliable-logging-agent-610fecf35566

• Google Monitoring Infrastructure: https://www.facebook.com/atscaleevents/videos/959344524420015/

27. Metrics and Text Search Engine

• Facebook real time text search engine: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=432864835468

• Elastic Search Time Based Querying: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/time-based.html

• Elastic Search Aggregation: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/aggregations.html

28. Single Point of Failure

• Avoiding Single Points of Failure: https://medium.com/the-cloud-architect/patterns-for-resilient-architecture-part-3-16e8601c488e

• Netflix Multi-Region Availability: https://netflixtechblog.com/active-active-for-multi-regional-resiliency-c47719f6685b

• Oracle Single Points of failure: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19693-01/819-0992/fjdch/index.html

• DNS single point of failure 2004: http://www.tenereillo.com/GSLBPageOfShame.htm

• Sharding: https://medium.com/@jeeyoungk/how-sharding-works-b4dec46b3f6

29. Location Based Services

• Google S2 library: https://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/

30. Batch Processing

• Map Reduce Architecture: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf

31. Real Time Stream Processing

• LinkedIn Brooklin- Real time data streaming: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/brooklin-open-source

• Netflix Real Time Stream Processing: https://netflixtechblog.com/keystone-real-time-stream-processing-platform-a3ee651812a

32. Caching

• Google Guava Cache: https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/CachesExplained

• Caching (See the README): https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/

• Caching: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/1/25/design-of-a-modern-cache.html

• Microsoft Caching Guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msp-n-p/dn589802(v%3dpandp.10)

• Caching patterns: https://hazelcast.com/blog/a-hitchhikers-guide-to-caching-patterns/

33. Distributed concensus

• Paxos: http://ifeanyi.co/posts/understanding-consensus/

• Raft: https://raft.github.io/

34. Authorization

• Designing an Authorization Model for an Enterprise https://cerbos.dev/blog/designing-an-authorization-model-for-an-enterprise