The system design library
Search and filter every curated system design video, article, repository and paper in one place.
251 resources
codeKarle
Low-level and high-level design of real products, worked through step by step.
YouTubeIntermediateBy codeKarle
Mining of Massive Datasets
Large-scale data processing: MapReduce, similarity search, recommendation and streams. The authors offer the whole book as a free download.
BooksAdvancedFree from the authorBy Jure Leskovec, Anand Rajaraman, Jeff Ullman · Stanford University
Readings in Database Systems (the Red Book)
Essays and papers on how database systems are built, with an introduction to each, free online from the editors.
BooksAdvancedFree from the authorBy Peter Bailis, Joseph Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker · Red Book
Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems
A full chapter on the building blocks of large websites: availability, performance, reliability, scalability, caches, proxies, indexes, load balancers and queues. Free to read here under CC BY 3.0.
BlogsBeginner40 minRead hereFree from the authorBy Kate Matsudaira · The Architecture of Open Source Applications
System Design Interview
A small set of detailed videos on how distributed systems and common interview designs work.
YouTubeIntermediateBy System Design Interview
30x Performance Improvements on MySQLStreamer at Yelp
Making 30x performance improvements on Yelp’s MySQLStreamer Abrar Sheikh, Software Engineer Feb 5, 2018 Introduction MySQLStreamer is an important application in Yelp’s Data Pipeline infrastructure. It’s responsible for streaming high-vo…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Yelp engineers · Yelp
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
Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases (paper)
Why Aurora moves the redo log to a distributed storage layer, so replication and crash recovery become cheap.
PapersAdvancedRead hereBy Verbitski et al. · Amazon Web Services
Amazon Redshift and the art of performance optimization in the cloud
The cloud gives excellent mechanisms to improve performance as Concurrency Scaling for Redshift shows
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Allthingsdistributed engineers · Allthingsdistributed
Amazon S3 strong consistency
What strong read-after-write consistency means for S3 and how it simplifies applications.
DocumentationIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services
Ambry: Distributed Immutable Object Store at LinkedIn
A SREcon talk on Ambry, LinkedIn's distributed object store for immutable blobs: its architecture, key features and operational flows.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy LinkedIn engineers · LinkedIn
Apache Cassandra
The source of the wide-column, leaderless database.
GitHubAdvancedBy Apache Software Foundation · GitHub
Apache Hadoop 3.3.5
Hardware failure is the norm rather than the exception. An HDFS instance may consist of hundreds or thousands of server machines, each storing part of the file system’s data. The fact that there are a huge number of components and that e…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Apache engineers · Apache
Architecture Notes
Illustrated explanations of how databases, protocols and systems work.
Podcasts & NewslettersBeginnerBy Architecture Notes · architecturenotes.co
Architecture of Nubank
Edward Wible and Rafael Ferreira discuss the key elements that make Nubank tick for millions of customers every day, including transaction authorization, messaging infrastructure (Kafka), real-time double-entry accounting (Datomic), cust…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy InfoQ engineers · InfoQ
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
Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems at Google
A real-world engineering write-up from Google on availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems at Google.
PapersIntermediateBy Google
AWS Big Data Blog
AWS posts and announcements on analytics and data topics, such as Redshift, EMR and Apache Iceberg tables.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
AWS Database Blog
Guidance on choosing, migrating and tuning relational and NoSQL databases.
BlogsIntermediateBy AWS database teams · Amazon Web Services
AWS News Blog
The Amazon Web Services blog: an index of its posts, to pick the ones on the topic you are studying.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
Backend Developer Roadmap
A visual guide to the skills a backend engineer builds, from databases to caching and APIs.
CoursesBeginnerBy roadmap.sh community · roadmap.sh
Bazaarvoice Engineering Blog
Bazaarvoice's R&D blog on platform engineering, user-generated-content APIs, web performance and database migrations.
BlogsIntermediateBy Bazaarvoice engineers · Bazaarvoice
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data (paper)
Google's wide-column store: tablets split by key range, a commit log plus sorted files on disk, and the design later copied by HBase and Cassandra.
PapersAdvancedRead hereBy Chang et al. · Google
Bitcask: a log-structured hash table for fast key/value data
The design note behind Bitcask: append-only files, an in-memory key directory and merging.
PapersAdvancedBy Justin Sheehy and David Smith · Basho Technologies