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.
14 resources
Autoscaling Bigtable Clusters based on CPU Load at Spotify
At Spotify we are moving to managed infrastructure solutions to focus more on our core competencies. In the databases space that means moving to .
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Autoscaling Pub-Sub Consumers at Spotify
is responsible for delivering hundreds of billions of events every day. Most of the events are generated as a response to a user action, such as playing a song, following an artist or clicking on an ad. All in all, more than 300 differen…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Big Data Processing (2 parts) at Spotify
In this part we’ll take a closer look at Scio, including basic concepts, its unique features, and concrete use cases here at Spotify.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
CDN Services at Spotify
Spotify built its business on flawless content delivery. Our streaming platform serves up more than 50 million tracks (plus an array of images and other assets) to more than 230 million monthly active users around the world — making us o…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
cstar: Cassandra Orchestration Tool at Spotify
Today, we announce that we are open sourcing , our Cassandra orchestration tool.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Data Orchestration Service at Spotify
TL;DR Within Spotify, we run 20,000 batch data pipelines defined in 1,000+ repositories, owned by 300+ teams — daily. The majority of our pipelines rely on two tools: (for the Python folks) and (for the Java folks). In 2019, the data orc…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Experimentation Platform (2 parts) at Spotify
So you’ve read of our two-part series about the new Experimentation Platform we’ve built at Spotify, and now know why we decided to invest in a new platform. In Part II, you’ll get a more detailed look at how we assigned users to experim…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Fleet Management (3 parts) at Spotify
This is part 3 in our series on Fleet Management at Spotify and how we manage our software at scale. See also and .
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Heroic: Time Series Database at Spotify
This is the second part in a series about Monitoring at Spotify. In the I discussed our history of operational monitoring. In this part I’ll be presenting Heroic, our scalable time series database which is now free software.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Infrastructure to Run User Forecasts at Spotify
TL;DR With Spotify’s rapid global expansion to more than 180 countries, it’s critical that the infrastructure of user forecasts catch up to business needs. As the business evolves, we need an infrastructure in place that can satisfy the …
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Music Personalization at Spotify
Five years ago, music personalization at Spotify was a tiny team. The team read papers, developed models, wrote data pipelines and built services. Today personalization involves multiple teams in New York, Boston & Stockholm producing da…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Scalable User Privacy at Spotify
At Spotify, we have a complex and diverse data processing ecosystem. Our backend infrastructure handles millions of requests per second, which are processed by over a thousand (micro)services. Our batch pipeline environment is equally co…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
Testing of Microservices at Spotify
Most people would say that we write tests to verify that things work as we expect them to.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify
XCMetrics: All-in-One Tool for Tracking Xcode Build Metrics at Spotify
TL;DR We just open sourced — a tool for Apple’s developer software, Xcode, that lets you collect, display, and track the valuable metrics hiding inside your team’s Xcode build logs. Are your build times improving or regressing? Which ver…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Spotify engineers · Spotify