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
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.
Classic designOfficial
Accept in milliseconds, work in the background: leases and heartbeats, retries and dead letters, progress by SSE and webhooks, fairness across tenants: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Files up to 50 GB up and down without a byte through the API: presigned URLs, resumable multipart, S3 events, scanning and CloudFront: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A live TV vote at a million writes a second: spread by key, buffer in Kafka, aggregate the hot counter in two stages, shed what can wait: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Serve a product page a million times a second: a cheap query, replicas, Redis and the edge, with hot keys, stampedes and invalidation handled: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
An order checkout across payment, inventory and shipping, run as a saga: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Design for contention through a limited sneaker drop: row locks, conditional writes, expiring holds, fencing tokens, sagas and one writer per item: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Every goal on 25 million open apps within two seconds: SSE or WebSockets, pub/sub to the right server, resume by seq, hot topics, reconnect storms and push: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Sell 10,000 units to a million people at noon with a lottery waiting room, a Redis gate before an Aurora ledger and holds that expire: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A hundred people typing in one document, every copy converging, nothing acknowledged lost: one owner per document, an op log with snapshots, and fenced failover: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Live comments for millions of viewers: SSE streams, a Redis channel per video with co-located viewers, sampling and CDN snapshots for hot videos: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Chat for a billion users: sockets on gateways, Redis pub/sub routing, an inbox per device, receipts, media in S3, encryption and regions: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Record runs and rides on the phone without signal, upload each once, show them to friends and rank athletes by week, month and year: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Stacks of nearby people in under 300 ms, 2 billion swipes a day, and a match never missed even when both like at once: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Search a billion posts a day by keyword, newest or most liked first, with an inverted index you build yourself: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Search 10 million businesses by place, words and category, keep every average rating exact, and keep fake reviews out: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.