Series

System Design

Deep dives into system design concepts, from databases and caching to distributed systems and scalability patterns.

Rate Limiting
Your API launches. Traffic is steady. Then a bot starts hammering your login endpoint with thousands of requests per second. Or a misbehaving client enters a retry loop. Or someone launches a brute-fo
Apr 11, 202619 min read3
Consistent Hashing
Consistent hashing is one of the most popular algorithms in distributed systems. It helps you answer one question: Who owns this data? That's it. Data ownership. Nothing else. TL;DR Consistent hashin
Jan 24, 202615 min read
Introduction to Big Data Tools
Big data processing is all about a set of tools that help you process data in a distributed fashion. When one machine is not capable of processing a huge amount of data, we do divide and conquer. That
Jan 24, 20269 min read3
Bloom Filters
Instagram wants to recommend reels to you. But does it make sense to recommend a reel you've already watched? No. You'd see the exact same video you saw an hour ago. That's a terrible experience. So w
Jan 24, 202614 min read
High Availability
Your server crashes. That's annoying, but manageable. Spin up another one, route traffic there. API servers are typically stateless. Losing one is like losing a waiter at a restaurant: inconvenient, b
Jan 23, 202621 min read
Communication Protocols
Two machines need to talk to each other. One machine (the client) wants something done. The other machine (the server) does the heavy lifting. This is the client-server model, and it's how almost ever
Jan 23, 202618 min read