Scaling Infrastructure: The Edge, Horizontal Scale, and the Math Behind Them
Application-level fixes (kill the N+1, add the index) get you a long way, but…
Tag
#scalability
15 posts
Performance, Measured: Percentiles, Profiling and the Laws That Decide What's Worth Optimizing
The single most expensive habit in performance work is optimizing by gut feel…
Scaling Pitfalls: Hotspots, Stampedes and Failure
A design that looks correct on the whiteboard can still collapse the first time…
Scaling Reads
Almost every system you will be asked to design is read-heavy. A social network…
Scaling Writes
In the previous lesson, reads scaled by making copies: a cache, a replica, a CDN…
Cracking the System Design Interview
System design interviews are the most feared round in senior engineering…
Estimation and Back-of-Envelope Math
When an interviewer asks you to estimate the storage requirements for a…
Deep Dive on Apache Kafka: A System Design Interview Perspective
“Kafka is not a message queue. It’s a distributed commit log that happens to be…
Deep Dive on Elasticsearch: A System Design Interview Perspective
“If you’re searching, filtering, or aggregating over large volumes of semi…
Deep Dive on API Gateway: A System Design Interview Perspective
“An API Gateway is the front door to your microservices. Every request walks…
Deep Dive on Redis: Architecture, Data Structures, and Production Usage
“Redis is not just a cache. It’s a data structure server that happens to be…
Deep Dive on Caching: From Browser to Database
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and…
System Design Patterns for Real-Time Updates at High Traffic
The previous articles in this series covered scaling reads and scaling writes…
System Design Patterns for Scaling Writes
In the companion article on scaling reads, we covered caching, replicas, and…
System Design Patterns for Scaling Reads
Most production systems are read-heavy. A typical web application sees 90-9…