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.
3 resources
Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix
Containers are already adding value to our proven globally available cloud platform based on Amazon EC2 virtual machines. We’ve shared pieces of Netflix’s container story in the past (video, slides), but this blog post will discuss conta…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Netflix engineers · Netflix
Scaling Push Messaging for Millions of Devices at Netflix
Susheel Aroskar talks about Zuul Push, a scalable push notification service that handles millions of "always-on" persistent connections from all the Netflix apps running. He covers the design of the Zuul Push server and reviews the desig…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Netflix engineers · Netflix
Active-Active for Multi-Regional Resiliency
How Netflix routes traffic across regions and survives regional outages.
Case StudiesAdvancedBy Netflix Engineering · Netflix