By ScalaBrix โ Production-grade System Architecture Insights
๐ System Design Interview Playbook โ Master Scalable Architecture, Distributed Systems & Real-World Patterns
Covering fundamentals, scalability strategies, database design, caching, and high-availability architectures โ for both interview success and production excellence.
Learn how to build scalable systems, design fault-tolerant architectures, and apply real-world system design patterns to ace your next system design interview.
๐ Build from core principles before diving into advanced systems.
๐ Progress logically from fundamentals โ high-scale architectures โ specialized patterns.
๐ฏ Focus your prep like an actual interview roadmap.
Your Journey:
1๏ธโฃ Foundation Layer โ Core building blocks & fundamentals
2๏ธโฃ Data Mastery โ Databases, caching & async workflows
3๏ธโฃ Scale & Reliability โ High-QPS, load balancing, fault tolerance
4๏ธโฃ Domain Expertise โ Real-world product architectures & case studies
Each article includes real-world trade-offs, scaling math, and production blueprints.
- ๐ Fundamentals & Core Building Blocks
- ๐ Database Design & High-Throughput Patterns
- โก Caching, Invalidation & Read Path Acceleration
- ๐งต Async, Orchestration & Worker Architectures
- ๐ฐ Distributed Query, Logging & Analytics
- ๐ฃ Feeds, Fan-Out & Notifications
- ๐ก Security, Zero-Trust & Governance
- ๐ถ Load Balancing, Backpressure & SLOs
- ๐งญ Real-Time Detection, Counters & Monitoring
- ๐งช Code Execution, Contests & Scheduling
- ๐ Domain Case Studies (Product Architectures)
- ๐ค Agent Era & Next-Gen Architectures
- ๐ Project Metrics
- ๐ค Contributing
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unlocking Scalability: Building Blocks (p1) | Read | Queues, Topics, Partitions, Consumer Groups, Offsets | |
| 2 | Unlocking Scalability: Advanced Blocks (p2) | Read | Backpressure, DLQs, API reliability patterns | |
| 3 | Beyond Resilience: Operational Blocks (p3) | Read | Alerting, Auto-Scaling, Self-Healing ops |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DB Design: Multi-Tenant Data Isolation | Read | Tenant isolation in shared DBs without cost explosion | |
| 2 | Rethinking Database Access: Zero-Trust & IAM | Read | IAM tokens, least privilege, real-time auth to DB | |
| 3 | High Throughput Reads/Writes (Read-Write Separation) | Read | Split read vs write paths to hit 1M QPS | |
| 4 | High Throughput Reads/Writes (CQRS) | Read | CQRS patterns, failover & resiliency for DB scale |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Distributed Cache Invalidation Service | Read | Consistent invalidation across distributed nodes | |
| 2 | Client-Side Caching with ETag Validation | Read | Save server load with smart validation | |
| 3 | Cluster-Wide Cache Warm-Up Service | Read | Pre-warming strategies for cold-start & scale | |
| 4 | Read-Heavy Service w/ Regional Cache Replicas | Read | Geo-replicated read path, low latency design |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Designing Robust Asynchronous Operations (p1) | Read | End-to-end async flows, retries, backoffs | |
| 2 | Exactly-Once Processing for Distributed Workflows | Read | Idempotency, orchestration & compensation | |
| 3 | Auto-Scaling Worker Pools for Event Processing | Read | Feedback-driven elasticity, SLA-aware scaling | |
| 4 | Distributed Task Scheduling Service | Read | Highly scalable scheduler architecture |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Architecting Distributed Query Systems for Scale | Read | Search/filter/aggregate at massive scale | |
| 2 | Distributed Top-K IP Query at Web-Scale | Read | Find heavy hitters across 500M+ logs | |
| 3 | From Log Chaos to Order (Kafka Log Merging) | Read | Aggregating & streaming microservice logs | |
| 4 | Distributed Logging Systems at Scale (p1) | Read | Multi-tenant, cost-efficient log platform |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | System Design Twitter: Scaling Timeline Writes | Read | Fan-out-on-write at Twitter scale | |
| 2 | Fan-Out-on-Write (Blueprint) | Read | Single write โ millions of timelines | |
| 3 | High-Performance Fan-Out-on-Read | Read | Deadline-bounded aggregation; partial failures | |
| 4 | Scaling Notification Fan-Out to 10M Devices | Read | Mobile push, batching, delivery guarantees | |
| 5 | How a Single Post Reaches Millions | Read | Per-stage payloads & latency math for fan-out |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rethinking DB Access: Zero-Trust & IAM Tokens | Read | Live, least-privilege access to data | |
| 2 | Distributed API Key Revocation Service | Read | Instant key revocation across infra |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enterprise-Grade Load Balancing Architecture | Read | Multi-layer LBs, failover, autoscaling, obs. | |
| 2 | Handling Backpressure in Video Streaming | Read | Smoothing producers/consumers under load | |
| 3 | Deep Dive into 1M RPS API Design | Read | Throughput, latency, HA & cost trade-offs |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Distributed Anomaly Count: Detecting API Spikes | Read | Multi-node spike/traffic surge detection | |
| 2 | Counting Every Click: Real-Time View Counters | Read | Live counters with accuracy & low latency | |
| 3 | Assigning 100K Unique Timestamps/sec | Read | Global ordering & clock contention control |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | On-Demand Code Execution System (Part 1) | Read | Event-driven workers, sandboxing, isolation | |
| 2 | On-Demand Code Execution System (Part 2) | Read | Secure execution, retries, failure workflows | |
| 3 | Coding Contest & Leaderboard | Read | Concurrency at scale, ranking pipelines | |
| 4 | Distributed Task Scheduling Service | Read | Time-based & event-driven scheduling at scale |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Payment Wallet | Read | Microservice design for wallet/payments | |
| 2 | Ticket Booking System | Read | Inventory, concurrency & seat locking | |
| 3 | Content Aggregator (News/Articles) | Read | Crawling, indexing, ranking, feeds | |
| 4 | Online Forum (Part 1) | Read | Real-time, caching & moderation flows |
| # | Title | Link | What Youโll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Blueprint: Modern System Design for the Agent Era (2025+) | Read | Layered, production-ready agent platform | |
| 2 | Repackaging Microservices into Single-Tenant Monoliths | Read | Isolation + shared control/observability planes | |
| 3 | Distributed Prime Number Finder | Read | Billion-scale parallel compute blueprint |
๐ข Stay Ahead in System Design!
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- ๐ Add case studies & architectural diagrams
- ๐ Improve patterns with trade-offs & benchmarks
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๐ Master the patterns. Ace the interview. Ship production systems with confidence.
