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.
4 resources
Building Reliable Social Infrastructure for Google - Marc Alvidrez, Senior Manager at Google
Book your room for $225 single or double plus tax or call (800) 255-9925 or (408) 988-8411 and reference USENIX Association or Billing ID #32992. Room rate includes WiFi and complimentary shuttle to the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Google engineers · Google
Chubby: Lock Service for Loosely Coupled Distributed Systems at Google
The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems – Burrows ’06 This paper describes the Chubby lock service at Google, which was designed as a coarse-grained locking serv…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Google engineers · Google
Performance Optimization on Image, Video, Page Load
Before you can get started with learning performance, you first have to understand its role in the user experience, and how it can result in better outcomes for users. This course starts off with a brief introduction into these topics, g…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Google engineers · Google
Single Repository at Google
Early Google employees decided to work with a shared codebase managed through a centralized source control system. This approach has served Google well for more than 16 years, and today the vast majority of Google’s software assets conti…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Google engineers · Google