Topography / System Design

46 lessons and 298 connections between them, based on the cross-references in each lesson. Lines show references. For reading order, seethe System Design track page.

• The chai stall that got famous (load balancing)12 lessons link here
• The slate next to the stove (caching)9 lessons link here
• The order slip rail (queues & the utilization cliff)13 lessons link here
• The copy clerks (database replication)8 lessons link here
• Splitting the ledger (sharding)18 lessons link here
• The cut phone line (CAP, done properly)14 lessons link here
• The bouncer at the door (rate limiting)8 lessons link here
• Who holds the pen (consensus & Raft)6 lessons link here
• The Two Ledgers Must Agree (Distributed Transactions)9 lessons link here
• Charged Twice (idempotency & exactly-once)13 lessons link here
• The Ledger Everyone Reads (event-driven & the log)19 lessons link here
• Design the Whole Thing (the interview, assembled)8 lessons link here
• The Right Book for the Job (databases, deeply)11 lessons link here
• The Slate, Properly (caching to real depth)15 lessons link here
• The Contract at the Counter (API design)6 lessons link here
• Four Systems in One Night (worked designs)8 lessons link here
• Discord - the case study13 lessons link here
• Instagram - the case study16 lessons link here
• YouTube - the case study14 lessons link here
• Slack - the case study11 lessons link here
• Figma - the case study5 lessons link here
• Cloudflare - the case study10 lessons link here
• Dropbox - the case study4 lessons link here
• Amazon - the case study6 lessons link here
• OpenRouter - the case study4 lessons link here
• Claude - the case study0 lessons link here
• Netflix - the case study6 lessons link here
• Uber - the case study4 lessons link here
• WhatsApp - the case study5 lessons link here
• Twitter (X) - the case study5 lessons link here
• Stripe - the case study0 lessons link here
• Zomato - the case study3 lessons link here
• Google Maps - the case study0 lessons link here
• Google Search - the case study5 lessons link here
• Why Data Is the Hard Part (the five building blocks)1 lesson links here
• One wala, many kettles (concurrency vs parallelism)2 lessons link here
• Thirty stalls on one order (availability, the nines, and the tail at scale)1 lesson links here
• The stall that turns people away (load shedding and admission control)1 lesson links here
• Counting the crowd without a register (HyperLogLog, count-min, top-k)0 lessons link here
• The last vada (inventory contention and locking)0 lessons link here
• The branch near your house (CDNs and object storage)0 lessons link here
• The customer who won't hang up (polling, SSE and WebSockets)0 lessons link here
• A lock on every door of the stall (security inside a design)0 lessons link here
• The stall, built: one counter in code (load balancing, health checks and caching in Go)2 lessons link here
• The stall, built: copies and shards (replication and sharding in Go)2 lessons link here
• The stall, built: rush hour (load testing, p99 and the knee in Go)1 lesson links here