The system design library
Search and filter every curated system design video, article, repository and paper in one place.
26 resources
System Design Interview
A small set of detailed videos on how distributed systems and common interview designs work.
YouTubeIntermediateBy System Design Interview
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
Consistent Hashing and Random Trees (paper)
The original consistent-hashing paper, written for distributing web caches.
PapersAdvancedRead hereBy Karger et al. · MIT
Cross Shard Transactions at 10 Million RPS at Dropbox
How Dropbox added cross-shard transactions to Edgestore, its metadata store, with a modified two-phase commit proven on a live system at 10 million requests a second.
Case StudiesAdvancedRead hereBy Dropbox engineers · Dropbox
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages
The data model and partitioning of Discord's message store on Cassandra, and the hot-partition problems it met.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Discord
MongoDB at Baidu: Multi-Tenant Cluster Storing 200+ Billion Documents across 160 Shards
Learn how MongoDB powers real-time applications and intelligent experiences for critical use cases across industries.
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Mongodb engineers · Mongodb
MongoDB: Shard Keys
How the choice of shard key controls distribution, hot spots and query patterns.
DocumentationIntermediateBy MongoDB · MongoDB Inc.
PlanetScale Blog
MySQL scaling, sharding with Vitess and database internals.
BlogsIntermediateBy PlanetScale engineers · PlanetScale
Scale with Redis Cluster
Hash slots, resharding and failover in Redis Cluster.
DocumentationIntermediateBy Redis · Redis Ltd.
Scaling Services with Shard Manager at Facebook
Over the years, as we’ve expanded in scale and functionalities, Facebook has evolved from a basic web server architecture into a complex one with thousands of services working behind the scenes. It…
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Facebook engineers · Facebook
Sharding MySQL at Quora
Team: Nagavamsi (Vamsi) Ponnekanti, Lingduo Kong, Hwan Seung Yeo (manager) In this blog post, we discuss how Quora was able to scale our usage of MySQL to meet the growing requirements of our content. We’ll focus especially on the challe…
Case StudiesIntermediateBy Quora engineers · Quora
Sharding MySQL at Twilio
A real-world engineering write-up from Twilio on relational Databases.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Twilio engineers · Twilio
Sharding out Elasticsearch at Vinted
How Vinted diagnosed problems with its Elasticsearch shards and fixed them with metrics and automation.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Vinted engineers · Vinted
Sharding Postgres at Figma
Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Figma engineers · Figma
Sharding Postgres at Notion
With an effort to make Notion faster and more reliable for years to come — we migrated Notion’s PostgreSQL monolith into a horizontally-partitioned database fleet.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Notion engineers · Notion
Shopify Engineering
Scaling a very large commerce platform: sharding, resilience, flash sales and payments.
BlogsIntermediateBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Vitess
A MySQL sharding system created at YouTube to scale databases horizontally.
GitHubAdvancedBy CNCF / Vitess · GitHub
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
Uber Schemaless: A Scalable MySQL Datastore
How Uber built an append-only, sharded datastore on top of MySQL.
Case StudiesAdvancedRead hereBy Uber Engineering · Uber
YouTube Architecture
A look at YouTube's early scaling decisions around MySQL, caching and video serving.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy High Scalability
Hello Interview: System Design in a Hurry
Free written guide covering the delivery framework, core concepts and key technologies.
CoursesIntermediateBy Hello Interview
How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
A migration story from MongoDB to Cassandra to ScyllaDB at huge scale.
BlogsAdvancedBy Bo Ingram · Discord
Uber Engineering Blog
How Uber builds dispatch, maps, data platforms and real-time infrastructure.
BlogsAdvancedBy Uber Engineering · Uber
The System Design Primer
The most-starred system design study guide: scalability concepts, trade-offs and Anki flashcards.
GitHubBeginnerBy Donne Martin · donnemartin