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.
7 resources
10 Tips for Building Resilient Payment Systems
Practical rules from Shopify's payments team: idempotency, retries, reconciliation and more.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify Engineering · Shopify
Circuit Breaker at Shopify
Learn to predict how your application will behave in times of failure and how to configure every parameter for your Semian circuit breaker.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Docker Containers that Power Over 100.000 Online Shops at Shopify
This is the second in a series of blog posts describing our evolution of Shopify toward a Docker-powered, containerized data center. This instalment will focus on the creation of the container used in our production environment when you …
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Kafka on Kubernetes at Shopify
In the Beginning, There Was the Data Center Shopify is a leading multi-channel commerce platform that powers over 600,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries. We first adopted Apache Kafka as our data bus for reliable messaging in …
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Read Consistency with Database Replicas at Shopify
At Shopify, we’ve long used database replication for redundancy and failure recovery, but only fairly recently started to explore the potential of replicas as an alternative read-only data source for applications.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Scaling iOS CI with Anka at Shopify
Shopify has a growing number of software developers working on mobile apps such as Shopify, Shopify POS and Frenzy. As a result, the demand for a scalable and stable build system increased. Our Developer Acceleration team decided to inve…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Tech Stack at Shopify
9 minute read Before 2015, we had an Operations and Performance team. Around this time, we decided to create the Production Engineering department and merge the teams. The department is responsible for building and maintaining common inf…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify