The design library
Building blocks, complete architectures, and variations worth comparing. Search by the problem you want to solve or a component you want to understand.
Classic designOfficial
Build a queue around visibility leases and explicit acknowledgement, then add replicated partitions, FIFO groups, tenant fairness and bounded redrive: three self-contained interview boards.
Classic designOfficial
An S3-inspired object store: bytes before metadata, a partitioned namespace with cache coherence, then repair, heat, lifecycle and safe change. Three interview boards with explicit assumptions and AWS source boundaries.
Classic designOfficial
Declarative objects and reconciling control loops: scheduling, pod networking, an available control plane, and fleet isolation, explained through three self-contained interview boards.
Classic designOfficial
A coordination service like ZooKeeper: znodes, sessions and watches, a ZAB quorum of five with observers, and the recipes for elections and locks: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A stateful stream processor: dataflow graphs, keyed state in RocksDB, event time and watermarks, windows, barrier checkpoints, exactly-once into Kafka: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A relational database like PostgreSQL: WAL and MVCC on one server, quorum replication and failover, then a sharded fleet: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A key-value store like DynamoDB, from one durable node to Paxos-replicated partitions to global tables run for thousands of tenants: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A leaderless wide-column store: a token ring with virtual nodes, consistency tuned per query, an LSM write path and repair that keeps replicas converged: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
One front door for hundreds of services: routing, auth, limits, retries and canaries, with a control plane that ships config safely to thousands of machines: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Workflows as code that survive any crash: event histories and replay, activities retried under timeouts, durable timers, sharded history: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A partitioned, replicated append-only log: a million messages a second, order per key, nothing acknowledged ever lost, a week of replayable history: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Search a billion documents in 200 ms: inverted indexes, analysers, Lucene segments, shards and replicas, query then fetch with BM25, fed by CDC: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
An in-memory data store like Redis, from one event loop to Redis Cluster to a durable platform: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.