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.
5 resources
Monitor DNS systems at Stripe
The secret life of DNS packets: investigating complex networks.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Stripe engineers · Stripe
Online migrations at scale
A four-step method (dual write, backfill, switch reads, remove old) for changing a live database without downtime.
Case StudiesAdvancedRead hereBy Jacqueline Xu · Stripe
Operate Kubernetes Reliably at Stripe
We recently built a distributed cron job scheduling system on top of Kubernetes, an exciting new platform for container orchestration. Kubernetes is very popular right now and makes a lot of exciting promises: one of the most exciting is…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Stripe engineers · Stripe
Similarity Clustering to Catch Fraud Rings at Stripe
We use machine learning and similarity clustering to catch fraud rings on Stripe.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Stripe engineers · Stripe
Stripe's payments APIs: the first 10 years
How a payments API evolved over a decade, with lessons on versioning and backward compatibility.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Stripe