All 33 articles, sorted alphabetically
System Design: Rate Limiting
A comprehensive guide to rate limiting: token bucket mechanics, distributed Redis-backed implementations, sliding window and leaky bucket algorithms, fixed window trade-offs, and practical patterns for API throttling, traffic shaping, and cloud cost control.
Read article →System Design: Load Balancing - AICassindra
Deep dive into Load Balancing strategies, algorithms, and implementation patterns in distributed systems.
Read article →Airbnb Smart Pricing Architecture
The ML system that suggests nightly prices to hosts across millions of listings.
Read article →Designing a Real-Time Chat System (1M concurrent users)
End-to-end architecture for a WhatsApp-scale chat system, from connection layer to message storage.
Read article →Designing a File Upload Service (S3-style)
Resumable uploads multipart deduplication and lifecycle policies.
Read article →Designing a Metrics Aggregation System
Time-series ingest pre-aggregation and downsampling.
Read article →Designing Uber Dispatch System
Geo-indexing matchmaking and surge pricing.
Read article →Meta Threads Architecture
How Threads launched in 5 days by leveraging Instagram's infrastructure.
Read article →API gateway architecture
Deep-dive on API gateway design: data plane vs control plane, route matching and filter chains, JWKS-cached auth, distributed rate limiting, retry bud…
Read article →Content Delivery Network Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of CDN architecture: client, edge PoP, origin shield, origin, cache rules, purge, optimization, TLS, edge compute, analytics, …
Read article →CQRS architecture
Deep-dive on CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation): splitting the write model that validates commands and mutates a normalized source of tru…
Read article →Dead-letter queue architecture
Deep-dive on the dead-letter queue: the delivery counter and retry policy, broker-level vs application-level dead-lettering, the failure-metadata cont…
Read article →Distributed lock architecture
Deep-dive on distributed locks: consensus-backed lock services (etcd, ZooKeeper), lease TTLs and sessions, fencing tokens checked at the resource, wai…
Read article →Event sourcing architecture
Deep-dive on event sourcing: commands and aggregates that emit events, the append-only event store as source of truth, rehydrating state by replay, sn…
Read article →Geo-distributed systems -- serving the world with low latency
Deep-dive on geo-distributed systems: the latency/availability/law drivers, multi-region replicas, data placement, the speed-of-light consistency-vs-l…
Read article →Gossip protocol architecture - epidemic membership, failure detection, and anti-entropy
Deep-dive on gossip protocols: the SYN/ACK/ACK2 digest exchange and version merge, phi-accrual failure detection and suspicion lifecycle, anti-entropy…
Read article →Hot-key mitigation architecture
Deep-dive on surviving hot keys in sharded systems: why hashing concentrates load, approximate hotspot detection, edge caching for read-hot keys, key …
Read article →Idempotency architecture
Deep-dive on idempotency architecture: keys, dedupe store, retry policy, conflict handling, cross-service propagation, TTL, and audit.
Read article →Leader election architecture
Deep-dive on leader election: quorum-based campaigning, terms/epochs, leases and heartbeats for bounded failover, fencing tokens that neutralize a sta…
Read article →Load shedding -- dropping work to survive overload
Deep-dive on load shedding: the overload-collapse problem, rejecting excess load, serve-some-well-rather-than-all-badly, fail fast (early rejection), …
Read article →Notification System Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of a notification system: producers, ingest queue, notification service, preferences, dedup + batching, channels, delivery tra…
Read article →Transactional outbox architecture
Deep-dive on the transactional outbox pattern: why commit-then-publish dual writes lose or fabricate events, writing the event to an outbox table in t…
Read article →Pub/sub system design architecture
Deep-dive on pub/sub design: topics, partitions, consumers, delivery guarantees, retention, DLQ, schema registry, and metrics.
Read article →Distributed Rate Limiter Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of a production distributed rate limiter: edge, gateway, local token bucket, global sliding window, Redis + Lua, fallback, and…
Read article →Rate limiting architecture
Deep-dive on rate-limiting architecture: local buckets + shared counters + sliding-window smoothing + policy pipeline for safe changes.
Read article →Read-replica routing architecture
Deep-dive on routing reads to replicas safely: read classification, LSN/GTID write watermarks, session stores, byte vs time lag, replica ejection, pri…
Read article →Saga pattern architecture
Deep-dive on the saga pattern: orchestration vs choreography, the durable saga log, compensating transactions and pivot placement, idempotency keys an…
Read article →Search System Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of search architecture: docs, indexer, inverted index, query, hybrid retrieval, reranking, personalization, analytics, shardin…
Read article →Service discovery architecture
Deep-dive on service discovery: the health-checked registry, client-side vs server-side discovery, DNS and mesh-sidecar packagings, watches and cachin…
Read article →Database sharding architecture
Deep-dive on database sharding: choosing the shard key, range versus hash partitioning, the routing layer and shard directory, online rebalancing, per…
Read article →Caching
The layers of caching in modern systems: CDN, reverse proxy, application cache (Redis), database query cache, and the eternal problem of cache invalid…
Read article →Load Balancing
How load balancers distribute traffic across backend servers: L4 vs L7, round-robin vs least-connections, and health-check design.
Read article →Message Queues
The main message queue types (log-based Kafka vs broker-based RabbitMQ vs managed SQS), semantics (at-least-once vs at-most-once vs exactly-once), and…
Read article →