System Design
39 articles on system design.
System DesignCaching Strategies in System Design: 4 Patterns
Master cache-aside, read-through, write-through, and write-behind patterns. Learn when each strategy wins, what breaks, and how to explain the tradeoffs in system design interviews.
System DesignOperational Transformation: How Google Docs Syncs Edits
How does Google Docs handle 25 million concurrent editors without losing edits? A deep dive into operational transformation, its architecture, and how it compares to CRDTs.
System DesignCircuit Breaker Pattern in Distributed Systems: When and How to Use It
The circuit breaker pattern explained: its three states, when to use it, and how to implement it with Resilience4j to stop cascading failures in microservices.
System DesignFault Tolerance for AI Agent Pipelines: Retry and Recovery Patterns
How to build a fault tolerant AI agent pipeline with retries, circuit breakers, checkpoints, dead-letter queues, and graceful degradation so one failed step never crashes the whole run.
System DesignHierarchical Agent Architecture: The Supervisor Agent Pattern
The supervisor agent pattern turns a chaotic flat multi-agent system into a clean hierarchy. Here is how to design the routing, state, and error recovery.
System DesignCascading Failure: When One Command Takes Down Everything
How a single mistyped command sparked the 2017 AWS S3 outage, why cascading failures spread through dependencies and retries, and the patterns that stop them.
System DesignUber System Design: Geospatial Matching, Surge Pricing, ETA
Design Uber the way interviewers want: a spatial index at the center, with geospatial matching, real-time surge pricing, and ML-based ETA prediction built on top.
System DesignZero Downtime Database Migration: The Cassandra Story
A zero downtime database migration lets you move off Cassandra while users keep reading and writing. Here are the five phases, using Discord's move to ScyllaDB as the example.
System DesignSynchronous vs Asynchronous Communication Explained
The choice between synchronous and asynchronous communication shapes latency, failure modes, and coupling. Here is how request-response, fire-and-forget, and event-driven differ, and when to use each.