All Articles (10 articles)

  • LRU Cache Design: Eviction Strategies and Trade-offs

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 25 min read

    Learn the classic LRU cache implementation, understand its limitations, and explore modern alternatives like LRU-K, 2Q, ARC, and SIEVE for building high-performance caching systems.

  • Unique ID Generation in Distributed Systems

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 16 min read

    Designing unique identifier systems for distributed environments: understanding the trade-offs between sortability, coordination overhead, collision probability, and database performance across UUIDs, Snowflake IDs, ULIDs, and KSUIDs.

  • Distributed Cache Design

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 18 min read

    Distributed caching is the backbone of high-throughput systems. This article covers cache topologies, partitioning strategies, consistency trade-offs, and operational patterns—with design reasoning for each architectural choice.

  • Blob Storage Design

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 17 min read

    Designing scalable object storage systems requires understanding the fundamental trade-offs between storage efficiency, durability, and access performance. This article covers the core building blocks—chunking, deduplication, metadata management, redundancy, and tiered storage—with design reasoning for each architectural choice.

  • Distributed Search Engine

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 20 min read

    Building scalable full-text search systems: inverted index internals, partitioning strategies, ranking algorithms, near-real-time indexing, and distributed query execution. This article covers the design choices that shape modern search infrastructure—from Lucene’s segment architecture to Elasticsearch’s scatter-gather execution model.

  • Distributed Logging System

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 13 min read

    Centralized logging infrastructure enables observability across distributed systems. This article covers log data models, collection architectures, storage engines, indexing strategies, and scaling approaches—with design trade-offs and real-world implementations from Netflix (5 PB/day), Uber, and others.

  • Distributed Monitoring Systems

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 16 min read

    Designing observability infrastructure for metrics, logs, and traces: understanding time-series databases, collection architectures, sampling strategies, and alerting systems that scale to billions of data points.

  • Task Scheduler Design

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 18 min read

    Designing reliable distributed task scheduling systems: understanding scheduling models, coordination mechanisms, delivery guarantees, and failure handling strategies across Airflow, Celery, Temporal, and similar platforms.

  • Sharded Counters

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 13 min read

    Scaling counters beyond single-node write limitations through distributed sharding, aggregation strategies, and consistency trade-offs.A counter seems trivial—increment a number, read it back. At scale, this simplicity becomes a bottleneck. A single counter in Firestore supports ~1 write/second. A viral tweet generates millions of likes. Meta’s TAO handles 10 billion requests/second. The gap between “increment a number” and “count engagements for 2 billion users” spans orders of magnitude in both throughput and architectural complexity.

  • Leaderboard Design

    System Design / System Design Building Blocks 16 min read

    Building real-time ranking systems that scale from thousands to hundreds of millions of players. This article covers the data structures, partitioning strategies, tie-breaking approaches, and scaling techniques that power leaderboards at gaming platforms, fitness apps, and competitive systems.