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.
VariationOfficial
The URL shortener with a payload: the same id generation and cache-first read path, but the value is kilobytes of text, so it moves out of the database and into object storage.
Classic designOfficial
Exact, semantic and prefix caching in front of LLMs: scoped keys, distances with an error budget, tenant isolation, invalidation and measured savings: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Buy the cheapest offer under a maximum price from 1,000 sellers: cached offers, coalesced quotes, a hold-order-capture saga, open requests: 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
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
Collect from 20,000 publishers by push, polls and crawls, file each article once into feeds by region and category, and serve a billion pages a day from the edge: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Show what 10,000 small warehouses can deliver within the hour in under 100 ms, and take multi-item orders without ever selling a unit twice: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Seven-character codes that never clash, a billion redirects a day from three layers of cache, takedowns everywhere within a minute: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
A terabyte of key-value pairs in memory across fifty nodes, read in a millisecond, with LRU, TTLs, replication, hot keys and stampedes handled: one-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
Classic designOfficial
Google Calendar-style events with recurrence, RSVPs and on-time reminders, using CDC for change notifications and a delay queue for reminders.
Building blockOfficial
The service reads the cache first and fills it on a miss, so the cache holds only what is actually asked for and an outage degrades to slow rather than down.