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.
20 resources
Accelerator: Fast Data Processing Framework at eBay
The Expertmaker Accelerator is a well-proven data processing framework that provides fast data access, parallel execution, and automatic organization of source code, input data, and results. It can be used for daily data analysis tasks a…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Akutan: Distributed Knowledge Graph Store at eBay
We're excited to announce the public release of Akutan, a distributed knowledge graph store, under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Akutan is the result of four person-years of exploration and engineering effort, so there's a lot to u…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy eBay engineers · eBay
Altus Care: Applying a Chatbot to Platform Engineering at eBay
eBay developers recently combined several commonly used technologies, including Lucene search and the Stanford Natural Language Processor, to create Altus Care, a chatbot that provides an instant one-stop support solution for internal eB…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Centralized Application Logging at eBay
CAL Ingress, the main component of eBay's Centralized Application Logging (CAL) system, is responsible for collecting, processing, and dispatching application server local logs from thousands of CAL clients in the cloud. This article int…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy eBay engineers · eBay
Compression Techniques to Solve Network I/O Bottlenecks at eBay
eBay’s data storage related to Shopping Cart information relies on two different data stores.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Druid at eBay
Large scale event processing from logs to provide monitoring insights
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy eBay engineers · eBay
Elasticsearch Performance Tuning Practice at eBay
Elasticsearch is an open source search and analytic engine based on Apache Lucene that allows users to store, search, analyze data in near real time. While Elasticsearch is designed for fast queries, the performance depends largely on th…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
GRIT: Protocol for Distributed Transactions across Microservices at eBay
eBay technologists recently showed off a distributed transaction protocol called GRIT, for distributed ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) transactions across microservices with multiple underlying databases.
Case StudiesAdvancedRead hereBy eBay engineers · eBay
GUI Testing Powered by Deep Learning at eBay
Deep Learning (DL) is revolutionizing the face of many industries these days, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and machine translation, and it penetrates many science-driven products and technological companies, incl…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Improving Search Engine Efficiency by over 25% at eBay
The search engine plays an essential role in e-Commerce: it connects the user
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Lightweight Distributed Architecture to Handle Thousands of Library Releases at eBay
A new lightweight distributed architecture is proposed and applied on eBay’s release system to support thousands of libraries release work in high efficiency.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Optimizing CAL Report Hadoop MapReduce Jobs at eBay
eBay's Central Application Logging system (CAL) collects log data from all kinds of applications. The summary reports for log data are created using Hadoop MapReduce jobs. This article discusses our experiences optimizing these jobs.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Performance Tuning on Quartz Scheduler at eBay
Quartz is a popular open source job scheduling library for Java Application.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Practical NoSQL Resilience Design Pattern for the Enterprise at eBay
Building applications resilient to infrastructure failure is essential for systems that run in a distributed environment, such as NoSQL databases.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Prefetch Caching of Items at eBay
With 1.4 billion listings on eBay, improving the speed to render these listings at scale and accuracy is a huge engineering challenge. We have taken major steps to cache item data, which brings great speed improvements.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy eBay engineers · eBay
PyKrylov: Accelerating Machine Learning Research at eBay
A recent eBay Tech Blog article<sup>1</sup> presented the Unified AI platform called Krylov. In this article, we show how Krylov users interact with the platform to build and manage powerful workflows in a pythonic and efficient way.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Resiliency and Disaster Recovery with Kafka at eBay
High availability, resilience and scalability have become the standard when building user-facing applications. Cloud computing has been a contributing factor to that.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy eBay engineers · eBay
Similarity Engine at eBay
The Similarity Engine's use cases include item-to-item similarity for text and image modality and user-to-item personalized recommendations based on a user’s historical behavior data.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Troubleshooting a Connection Timeout Issue with tcp_tw_recycle Enabled at eBay
Availability and stability are very important for eBay
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay
Unicorn: Remediation System at eBay
Rheos is eBay's near-line data platform, and it owns thousands of stateful machines in the cloud. The Rheos team has been building and enhancing the automation system over the past two years. However, it’s time to unify the past work and…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy eBay engineers · eBay