System design case studies
How real companies build and scale their systems. Read an in-depth write-up, filter hundreds of engineering case studies, or open a similar design in the Builder.
In-depth write-ups
Each has an architecture diagram, the key components, scaling challenges and trade-offs, videos to watch and reading.
Architecture at a glance
- Service mesh of APIs
- Dynamo / DynamoDB
- SQS / SNS
- Cart & checkout
Architecture at a glance
- Application servers
- Sharded relational database
- Cache tier
- Media storage and CDN
Instagram
A photo and video feed that stays fast as the user base grows by orders of magnitude.
4 components3 challenges
Architecture at a glance
- Edge gateway (Zuul)
- Open Connect CDN
- Microservices
- Cassandra / EVCache
- +1 more
Netflix
Streaming to hundreds of millions of devices, built to survive failure.
5 components3 challenges
Architecture at a glance
- Streaming and CDN layer
- Metadata and catalogue services
- Event pipeline
- Recommendation platform
Spotify
Instant playback and personalised discovery for a global catalogue of audio.
4 components3 challenges
Architecture at a glance
- Dispatch service
- Location pipeline
- Schemaless / Docstore
- Kafka
- +1 more
Architecture at a glance
- Chat servers
- Message queue / store
- Presence service
- Media storage + CDN
Architecture at a glance
- Upload service
- Transcoding workers
- Metadata DB (Vitess)
- CDN / edge caches
- +1 more
439 engineering case studies
Write-ups from the companies themselves, with credit. Pick a company, or use the filters for topic, design area, difficulty and creator.
10 resources
Aroma: Using ML for Code Recommendation at Facebook
Thousands of engineers write the code to create our apps, which serve billions of people worldwide. This is no trivial task—our services have grown so diverse and complex that the codebase contains…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Building Real Time Infrastructure at Facebook - Jeff Barber and Shie Erlich, Software Engineer at Facebook
Jeff was writing code before Al Gore invented the Internet. Starting in college with building game engines for no games, his passion led him directly into infrastructure. After starting a company, doing a tour of duty at Amazon working o…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Canopy: Scalable Distributed Tracing & Analysis at Facebook
Haozhe Gao and Joe O’Neill present Canopy, Facebook’s performance and efficiency tracing infrastructure. They talk about the lessons learned applying Canopy to a wide range of use cases at Facebook and present case studies of its use in …
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Continuous Integration Stack at Facebook
Over time, the software industry has come up with several ways to deliver code faster, safer, and with better quality. Many of these efforts center on ideas such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, agile development, DevOps, …
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Erlang at Facebook (slides)
How Facebook's chat backend used Erlang processes to hold huge numbers of connections and route messages.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Eugene Letuchy · Facebook
HALO: Hardware Analytics and Lifecycle Optimization at Facebook
HALO consists of monitoring, data processing, and data visualization components, in addition to a range of alerting and diagnostic tools.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Load Balancing infrastructure to support more than 1.3 billion users at Facebook
A SREcon talk on how Facebook's traffic team uses DNS and software load balancers to route and balance global traffic for over a billion users.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Migrating MySQL from 5.6 to 8.0 at Facebook
MySQL, an open source database developed by Oracle, powers some of Facebook’s most important workloads. We actively develop new features in MySQL to support our evolving requirements. These feature…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Scaling Services with Shard Manager at Facebook
Over the years, as we’ve expanded in scale and functionalities, Facebook has evolved from a basic web server architecture into a complex one with thousands of services working behind the scenes. It…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Scaling with Performance at Facebook - Bill Jia, VP of Infrastructure at Facebook
Bill is a Vice President at Facebook, in the Infrastructure group, overseeing AI/Applied Machine Learning infrastructure, performance and capacity engineering, and hardware validation engineering. Since joining Facebook in 2009, Bill has…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Facebook engineers · Facebook