The system design library
Search and filter every curated system design video, article, repository and paper in one place.
26 resources
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 S3 strong consistency
What strong read-after-write consistency means for S3 and how it simplifies applications.
DocumentationIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services
Avoiding fallback in distributed systems
Why rarely used fallback paths often fail when needed, and what Amazon does instead.
BlogsAdvancedBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Avoiding insurmountable queue backlogs
Why queues can accumulate work faster than it can be done, and design choices that keep recovery fast.
BlogsAdvancedBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
AWS Architecture Blog
Reference architectures and design lessons for building on AWS.
BlogsIntermediateBy AWS architects · Amazon Web Services
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 Compute Blog
AWS Lambda now exposes Availability Zone metadata through an endpoint in the execution environment, so your function can discover its AZ ID with an HTTP request. Use it to prefer same-AZ endpoints for services like ElastiCache, Amazon RD…
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
AWS Containers Blog
AWS posts on running containers, covering Amazon EKS, ECS, container registries and observability.
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 DevOps Blog
AWS CodeDeploy now offers a purpose-built RESTART deployment mode that reapplies the last successful revision to EC2 and on-premises fleets. It keeps restarts inside CodeDeploy with the same batch sizing, health checks, alarm monitoring,…
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
AWS Machine Learning Blog
It’s our goal for AWS to be the most secure place to run any workload, and in support of that we’ve been deeply investing in security across our services since AWS’s inception more than two decades ago. Our AI services like Amazon Bedroc…
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
AWS Networking Blog
Modernizing a monolith into microservices may require placing each new service in its own AWS account for isolation, independent scaling, and clear ownership. During that migration you hit a hard question: how do you shift a small, preci…
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · 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
AWS Security Blog
Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection correlates weak GuardDuty signals into a single, critical-severity attack sequence finding when their composition crosses a threshold of credibility. On May 20, 2026, the service started attachi…
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
Challenges with distributed systems
A tour of why distributed systems are hard: partial failure, unreliable networks, queues and retries.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Columnar Databases
Learn what NoSQL databases are what advantages nonrelational databases can have for your use case.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services engineers · Amazon Web Services
Ensuring rollback safety during deployments
How to make sure data and messages written by a new version can still be read after rolling back.
BlogsAdvancedBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Going faster with continuous delivery
How Amazon's pipelines test, stage and release changes automatically and safely.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Implementing health checks
Kinds of health checks, how load balancers use them, and how a careless check can take down a whole fleet.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Making retries safe with idempotent APIs
How idempotency tokens let clients retry requests without causing duplicate effects.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Static stability using Availability Zones
Designing so a system keeps working through a failure without needing to change anything at that moment.
BlogsAdvancedBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter
Why retries can make an outage worse, and how timeouts, capped retries and random jitter prevent retry storms.
BlogsIntermediateBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Using load shedding to avoid overload
How to reject excess work early and fairly so a service stays healthy under a surge.
BlogsAdvancedBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services
Workload isolation using shuffle sharding
A technique that assigns each customer a random small subset of servers, so one bad actor affects very few others.
BlogsAdvancedBy Amazon Builders' Library · Amazon Web Services