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Home/High Level Design

High Level Design

241 articles covering high level design concepts, patterns, and interview questions.

In a Hurry

System design crash course

Interview Framework

The system design interview framework Scoping the problem Non-functional requirements Back-of-envelope estimation Capacity planning in system design Estimation cheat sheet: practical reference values

Concepts

Scalability Load balancing Caching CDN (Content Delivery Network)Databases Indexing strategies

Anti-patterns

Thundering Herd Cache Stampede Chatty Microservices Distributed Monolith Split-Brain Fan-Out Amplification

Engineering Internals

Consistent hashing Distributed ID generation Write-ahead log (WAL)B-tree indexes LSM trees Bloom filters

Patterns

Circuit breaker pattern Retry with backoff and jitter Bulkhead pattern Dead-letter queue Saga pattern Outbox pattern

System Design Questions

Twitter / X Design Instagram Instagram URL Shortener YouTube Uber

Trade-offs

SQL vs NoSQL Monolith vs microservices Sync vs async REST vs GraphQL Push vs pull Strong vs. eventual consistency

Case Studies

Discord: Go to Rust migration Discord: Cassandra to ScyllaDB migration Slack: Migrating to a relational model Facebook BGP outage 2021 Netflix chaos engineering Stripe: Building for idempotency

Role-calibrated

Senior vs. staff engineer expectations Staff engineer system design Make vs. buy framework for system design Technical leadership in design reviews Principal engineer system design