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Explain complex systems using visuals and simple terms. Whether you’re preparing for a System Design Interview or you simply want to understand how systems work beneath the surface, we hope this repository will help you achieve that.
Start here
Curated paths
Beginner path
System Design Blueprint
Use this first if you want the overall map before jumping into individual topics.
Interview path
How to Ace System Design Interviews
Start here when the goal is structured practice and crisp tradeoff language.
Production path
System Design Building Blocks
Review the core primitives that appear in most real production architectures.
Distributed path
Distributed System Patterns
Use this when reliability, scale, and coordination are the hard parts.
Featured resources
High-signal reads
Resource Index
- API and Web Development
- Short/long polling, SSE, WebSocket
- Load Balancer Realistic Use Cases
- 5 HTTP Status Codes That Should Never Have Been Created
- How does gRPC work?
- How NAT Enabled the Internet
- Important Things About HTTP Headers
- Internet Traffic Routing Policies
- How Browsers Render Web Pages
- What makes HTTP2 faster than HTTP1?
- What is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)?
- Key Use Cases for Load Balancers
- 18 Common Ports Worth Knowing
- What are the differences between WAN, LAN, PAN and MAN?
- How does Javascript Work?
- 8 Tips for Efficient API Design
- Reverse Proxy vs. API Gateway vs. Load Balancer
- How does REST API work?
- Load Balancer vs. API Gateway
- How GraphQL Works at LinkedIn
- GraphQL Adoption Patterns
- A cheat sheet for API designs
- API Gateway 101
- Top 3 API Gateway Use Cases
- What do version numbers mean?
- Do you know all the components of a URL?
- Unicast vs Broadcast vs Multicast vs Anycast
- 10 Essential Components of a Production Web Application
- URL, URI, URN - Differences Explained
- API vs SDK
- A Cheatsheet to Build Secure APIs
- HTTP Status Codes You Should Know
- SOAP vs REST vs GraphQL vs RPC
- A Cheatsheet on Comparing API Architectural Styles
- Top 9 HTTP Request Methods
- What is a Load Balancer?
- Proxy vs Reverse Proxy
- HTTP/1 -> HTTP/2 -> HTTP/3
- Polling vs Webhooks
- How do we Perform Pagination in API Design?
- How to Design Effective and Safe APIs
- How to Design Secure Web API Access
- What Does an API Gateway Do?
- What is gRPC?
- Top 12 Tips for API Security
- Explaining 9 Types of API Testing
- REST API vs. GraphQL
- What is GraphQL?
- REST API Cheatsheet
- The Ultimate API Learning Roadmap
- The Evolving Landscape of API Protocols in 2023
- Real World Case Studies
- 100X Postgres Scaling at Figma
- API of APIs - App Integrations
- The one-line change that reduced clone times by 99% at Pinterest
- Is Telegram Secure?
- Fixing Bugs Automatically at Meta Scale
- How Levelsfyi Scaled to Millions of Users with Google Sheets
- McDonald’s Event-Driven Architecture
- Uber Tech Stack - CI/CD
- How to Design Stack Overflow
- Twitter 1.0 Tech Stack
- How does Twitter recommend “For You” Timeline in 1.5 seconds?
- How YouTube Handles Massive Video Uploads
- How Does a Typical Push Notification System Work?
- 4 Ways Netflix Uses Caching
- Netflix Tech Stack - Databases
- 0 to 1.5 Billion Guests: Airbnb’s Architectural Evolution
- How Netflix Scales Push Messaging
- Netflix’s Overall Architecture
- Netflix Tech Stack - CI/CD Pipeline
- How TikTok Manages a 200K File Frontend MonoRepo
- How Netflix Really Uses Java
- Evolution of Airbnb’s Microservice Architecture
- Reddit’s Core Architecture
- 10 Principles for Building Resilient Payment Systems
- What is the Journey of a Slack Message?
- Top 9 Engineering Blogs
- Uber Tech Stack
- Evolution of the Netflix API Architecture
- How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
- Twitter Architecture 2022 vs. 2012
- Evolution of Uber’s API Layer
- Netflix’s Tech Stack
- AI and Machine Learning
- Database and Storage
- Read Replica Pattern
- Pessimistic vs Optimistic Locking
- How to Upload a Large File to S3
- Types of Message Queues
- Smooth Data Migration with Avro
- The Ultimate Kafka 101 You Cannot Miss
- Database Isolation Levels
- Top 6 Data Management Patterns
- Why is Kafka Fast?
- Explaining the 4 Most Commonly Used Types of Queues
- Time Series DB (TSDB) in 20 Lines
- Differences in Event Sourcing System Design
- Erasure Coding
- Delivery Semantics
- Change Data Capture: Key to Leverage Real-time Data
- Can Kafka Lose Messages?
- Storage Systems Overview
- Explain the Top 6 Use Cases of Object Stores
- Top Eventual Consistency Patterns You Must Know
- B-Tree vs. LSM-Tree
- How to Decide Which Type of Database to Use
- Cloud Database Cheat Sheet
- Types of Memory
- Understanding Database Types
- Top 4 Data Sharding Algorithms Explained
- Top 6 Database Models
- SQL Statement Execution in Database
- What is Serverless DB?
- Why PostgreSQL is the Most Loved Database
- Top 10 Most Popular Open-Source Databases
- Is PostgreSQL Eating the Database World?
- How to Choose the Right Database
- iQIYI Database Selection Trees
- 8 Data Structures That Power Your Databases
- How to Implement Read Replica Pattern
- A Crash Course on Database Sharding
- IBM MQ -> RabbitMQ -> Kafka -> Pulsar: Message Queue Evolution
- CAP Theorem: One of the Most Misunderstood Terms
- Consistent Hashing Explained
- Types of Databases
- Key Concepts to Understand Database Sharding
- Database Locks Explained
- A Cheatsheet on Database Performance
- What does ACID mean?
- Top 5 Kafka Use Cases
- Types of Memory and Storage
- 7 Must-Know Strategies to Scale Your Database
- Technical Interviews
- Caching & Performance
- What is ELK Stack and Why is it Popular?
- Why are Content Delivery Networks (CDN) so Popular?
- How Big Keys Impact Redis Persistence
- A Beginner’s Guide to CDN
- The Ultimate Redis 101
- Cache Systems Every Developer Should Know
- Top 5 Strategies to Reduce Latency
- Top 5 Caching Strategies
- Things to Consider When Using Cache
- Cache Eviction Policies
- Memcached vs Redis
- Low Latency Stock Exchange
- Cache Miss Attack
- Top 8 Cache Eviction Strategies
- How Can Cache Systems Go Wrong?
- Top 6 Elasticsearch Use Cases
- How Does CDN Work?
- How Redis Architecture Evolved
- How Does Redis Persist Data?
- How can Redis be used?
- Why is Redis so Fast?
- How to Learn Elasticsearch
- What is CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
- Frontend Performance Optimization
- Which Latency Numbers Should You Know?
- Top Caching Strategies
- Top 9 Website Performance Metrics You Cannot Ignore
- Top 5 Common Ways to Improve API Performance
- Learn Cache
- Payment and Fintech
- E-commerce Workflow
- Digital Wallets: Banks vs. Blockchain
- What is a Stop-Loss Order and How Does it Work?
- What is Web 3.0? Why doesn’t it have ads?
- SWIFT Payment Messaging System
- 4 Ways of QR Code Payment
- Handling Hotspot Accounts
- Reconciliation in Payment
- Unified Payments Interface (UPI)
- How Scan to Pay Works
- Money Movement
- Payment System
- How to Learn Payments
- The Payments Ecosystem
- Foreign Exchange Payments
- How to Avoid Double Payment
- How do Apple Pay and Google Pay work?
- How VISA Works When Swiping a Credit Card
- How ACH Payment Works
- How does Visa make money?
- Software Architecture
- Inter-Process Communication on Linux
- Orchestration vs. Choreography in Microservices
- UML Class Diagrams Cheatsheet
- Amazon Prime Video Monitoring Service
- Is Microservice Architecture the Silver Bullet?
- Database Middleware
- 9 Best Practices for Developing Microservices
- Design Patterns Cheat Sheet
- Key Terms in Domain-Driven Design
- 8 Key OOP Concepts Every Developer Should Know
- 18 Key Design Patterns Every Developer Should Know
- 10 System Design Tradeoffs You Cannot Ignore
- 9 Essential Components of a Production Microservice Application
- 9 Best Practices for Building Microservices
- 8 Key Concepts in Domain-Driven Design
- 8 Common System Design Problems and Solutions
- 6 Software Architectural Patterns You Must Know
- How To Release A Mobile App
- How Do Computer Programs Run?
- Linux Boot Process Explained
- MVC, MVP, MVVM, VIPER Patterns
- The Ultimate Software Architect Knowledge Map
- Typical Microservice Architecture
- Top 5 Software Architectural Patterns
- DevTools & Productivity
- Git Commands Cheat Sheet
- How does Git Work?
- JSON Crack: Visualize JSON Files
- Git vs GitHub
- Git Merge vs. Git Rebase
- 30 Useful AI Apps That Can Help You in 2025
- Diagram as Code
- Top 9 Causes of 100% CPU Usage
- Top 6 Tools to Turn Code into Beautiful Diagrams
- Tools for Shipping Code to Production
- Making Sense of Search Engine Optimization
- Most Used Linux Commands Map
- Linux File Permissions Illustrated
- 5 Important Components of Linux
- 15 Open-Source Projects That Changed the World
- 20 Popular Open Source Projects Started by Big Companies
- Linux File System Explained
- Life is Short, Use Dev Tools
- How Git Works
- How do Companies Ship Code to Production?
- Software Development
- Top 6 Most Commonly Used Server Types
- How does Garbage Collection work?
- A Roadmap for Full-Stack Development
- What Are the Greenest Programming Languages?
- Java Collection Hierarchy
- Running C, C++, or Rust in a Web Browser
- Top 8 C++ Use Cases
- Top 6 Multithreading Design Patterns You Must Know
- Data Transmission Between Applications
- Blocking vs Non-Blocking Queue
- Big Endian vs Little Endian
- How to Avoid Crawling Duplicate URLs at Google Scale?
- 10 Books for Software Developers
- Top 8 Standards Every Developer Should Know
- How Do C++, Java, Python Work?
- 10 Key Data Structures We Use Every Day
- A Brief History of Programming Languages
- Top 6 Load Balancing Algorithms
- The Fundamental Pillars of Object-Oriented Programming
- Top 8 Programming Paradigms
- Algorithms for System Design Interviews
- Imperative vs Functional vs Object-oriented Programming
- Explaining 9 Types of API Testing
- The 9 Algorithms That Dominate Our World
- Concurrency vs Parallelism
- Linux Boot Process Explained
- 11 Steps to Go From Junior to Senior Developer
- 10 Good Coding Principles to Improve Code Quality
- Cloud & Distributed Systems
- How AWS Lambda Works Behind the Scenes
- 8 Must-Know Scalability Strategies
- System Design Cheat Sheet
- Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategies
- Vertical vs Horizontal Partitioning
- Top 9 Architectural Patterns for Data and Communication Flow
- Top 6 Cases to Apply Idempotency
- Top 5 Trade-offs in System Designs
- How to Detect Node Failures in Distributed Systems
- Why Meta, Google, and Amazon Stop Using Leap Seconds
- The Fantastic Four of System Design
- What makes AWS Lambda so fast?
- Scaling Websites for Millions of Users
- Resiliency Patterns
- 25 Papers That Completely Transformed the Computer World
- A Crash Course on Architectural Scalability
- Must Know System Design Building Blocks
- Monorepo vs. Microrepo: Which is Best?
- How to Handle Web Request Errors
- A Cheat Sheet for Designing Fault-Tolerant Systems
- Typical AWS Network Architecture
- Unique ID Generator
- Amazon’s Build System: Brazil
- Infrastructure as Code Landscape Cheatsheet
- How do we manage configurations in a system?
- How do we incorporate Event Sourcing into systems?
- The 12-Factor App
- Explaining 5 Unique ID Generators
- Retry Strategies for System Failures
- Cloud Monitoring Cheat Sheet
- Why Use a Distributed Lock?
- Top 6 Cloud Messaging Patterns
- Most Important AWS Services to Learn
- How to Transform a System to be Cloud Native
- Hidden Costs of the Cloud
- 2 Decades of Cloud Evolution
- Cloud Cost Reduction Techniques
- Top 7 Most-Used Distributed System Patterns
- Cloud Load Balancer Cheat Sheet
- AWS Services Evolution
- Azure Services Cheat Sheet
- A cheat sheet for system designs
- CAP, BASE, SOLID, KISS, What do these acronyms mean?
- System Design Blueprint: The Ultimate Guide
- How to Design for High Availability
- What is Cloud Native?
- Cloud Comparison Cheat Sheet
- Big Data Pipeline Cheatsheet for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
- AWS Services Cheat Sheet
- How it Works?
- How do AirTags work?
- How is Email Delivered?
- Design Gmail
- How Google/Apple Maps Blur License Plates and Faces
- Quadtree
- Build a Simple Chat Application with Redis
- Live Streaming Explained
- How to Design a System for Internationalization
- How to Design Google Docs
- Payment System
- Experiment Platform Architecture
- Design Google Maps
- Designing a Chat Application
- Design Stock Exchange
- How are Notifications Pushed to Our Phones or PCs?
- What Happens When You Upload a File to Amazon S3?
- Proximity Service
- How Do Search Engines Work?
- DevOps and CI/CD
- Top 10 Kubernetes Design Patterns
- Some DevOps Books I Find Enlightening
- Paradigm Shift: Developer to Tester Ratio
- Push vs Pull in Metrics Collection Systems
- Choose the Right Database for Metric Collection
- Top 4 Kubernetes Service Types
- Cloud Native Anti-Patterns
- Kubernetes Tools Stack Wheel
- Kubernetes Tools Ecosystem
- Kubernetes Periodic Table
- 9 Docker Best Practices You Must Know
- Netflix Tech Stack - CI/CD Pipeline
- Top 8 Must-Know Docker Concepts
- CI/CD Simplified Visual Guide
- Top 5 Most-Used Deployment Strategies
- Kubernetes Command Cheatsheet
- Kubernetes Deployment Strategies
- How does Terraform turn Code into Cloud?
- DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering
- Deployment Strategies
- Logging, Tracing, and Metrics
- Log Parsing Cheat Sheet
- DevOps vs NoOps: What’s the Difference?
- Why is Nginx so Popular?
- What is Kubernetes (k8s)?
- How does Docker work?
- CI/CD Pipeline Explained in Simple Terms
- Security
- What is DevSecOps?
- Encoding vs Encryption vs Tokenization
- Storing Passwords Safely: A Comprehensive Guide
- Designing a Permission System
- How Password Managers Work
- Is PassKey Shaping a Passwordless Future?
- Firewall Explained to Kids and Adults
- Cookies vs Sessions
- HTTP Cookies Explained With a Simple Diagram
- Token, Cookie, Session
- Sessions, Tokens, JWT, SSO, and OAuth Explained
- How to Design a Secure System
- Top 6 Firewall Use Cases
- Top 4 Authentication Mechanisms
- How Digital Signatures Work
- How do we manage sensitive data in a system?
- HTTPS, SSL Handshake, and Data Encryption Explained
- Symmetric vs Asymmetric Encryption
- Session-based Authentication vs. JWT
- JWT 101: Key to Stateless Authentication
- Is HTTPS Safe?
- Cybersecurity 101
- Cookies vs Sessions vs JWT vs PASETO
- How does SSH work?
- How Does a VPN Work?
- How Google Authenticator Works
- Types of VPNs
- What is a Cookie?
- OAuth 2.0 Flows
- Top Network Security Cheatsheet
- What is SSO (Single Sign-On)?
- How does HTTPS work?
- Session, Cookie, JWT, Token, SSO, and OAuth 2.0 Explained
- Explaining JSON Web Token (JWT) to a 10 Year Old Kid
- OAuth 2.0 Explained With Simple Terms
- Computer Fundamentals
- Paging vs Segmentation
- IPv4 vs. IPv6: Differences
- Top 4 Most Popular Use Cases for UDP
- How Does the Domain Name System (DNS) Lookup Work?
- DNS Record Types You Should Know
- TCP vs UDP for Online Gaming
- What is a Deadlock?
- Process vs Thread: Key Differences
- OSI Model Explained
- Visualizing a SQL Query
- Explaining 8 Popular Network Protocols in 1 Diagram
- What is the Best Way to Learn SQL?
License
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.