System Design Case Study #4: How WalkMe Engineering Scaled their Stateful Service Leveraging Pub-Sub Mechanism
WalkMe Engineering had a stateful monolith service handling an average of 22.5 million monthly requests, peaking upto 30 million. The service managed this massive load sustained by vertical scaling but started to show cracks as a single monolith server can be vertically scaled only so...
A Discussion on Stateless & Stateful Services (Managing User State on the Backend)
In most articles I come across on stateless and stateful services, stateful service architectures are viewed less favorably in contrast to stateless services primarily due to the horizontal scalability challenge they bring along. It is always recommended to implement a stateless service architecture as opposed...
System Design Case Study #3: How Discord Scaled Their Member Update Feature Benchmarking Different Data Structures
The member list update feature in Discord servers became quite a bottleneck in terms of memory & CPU usage because the system had to update the entire member list in every Discord server every time someone joined or left the server, changed their status (online,...
System Design Case Study #2: How GitHub Indexes Code For Blazing Fast Search & Retrieval
GitHub coded their search engine from scratch in Rust called Project Blackbird because existing off-the-shelf solutions didn’t fit their requirements at the scale they were operating. The engine supports features like searching with identifiers, punctuations, substrings, regular expressions, wildcards, etc., which are specific to code...
System Design Case Study #1: Exploring Slack’s Real-time Messaging Architecture
In this blog post, I explore Slack’s real-time messaging architecture with a discussion on the architectural and system design concepts they leverage to scale and keep the latency low. The study will help us understand the intricacies of real-world web-scale architectures, enhancing our system design...
Single-threaded Event Loop Architecture for Building Asynchronous, Non-Blocking, Highly Concurrent Real-time Services
Real-time services like chat apps, MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) games, financial trading systems, apps with live streaming features, etc., deal with heavy concurrent traffic and real-time data. These services are I/O bound as they spend a major chunk of resources handling input-output operations such as...
Understanding SLA (Service Level Agreement) In Cloud Services: How Is SLA Calculated In Large-Scale Services?
An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a contract or agreement between a service provider and the consumer that defines the expectations a consumer should have from the service provided by the service provider. An SLA helps maintain service standards and establishes service providers’ accountability towards...
Database Architecture – Part 2 – NoSQL DB Architecture with ScyllaDB (Shard Per Core Design)
In the first post of database architecture, I discussed the internal architecture of databases/database management systems, taking a peek into the architectures of MySQL and CockroachDB databases. In another article, a continuation of that article, I discussed how modern cloud servers run parallel compute to...
Parallel Processing: How Modern Cloud Servers Leverage Different System Architectures to Optimize Parallel Compute
Modern cloud servers leverage several system architectures to process data parallelly, which increases throughput, minimizes latency and optimizes resource consumption. In this article, I’ll discuss those system architectures and we’ll get an insight into how distributed services leverage these architectures to scale. With that being said....
Database Architecture – A Deep Dive – Part 1
This article is a deep dive into the internal architecture of databases/DBMS (Database Management Systems). I’ll begin with a standard architecture relational databases have; will then take a peek into the architectures of a couple of real-world SQL databases and then, in the subsequent articles,...
Application architecture explained in-depth with a real-world example
In my previous post on application architecture, I discussed various components that form a scalable web application architecture. That article will help you understand the basic building blocks of application architecture. Besides explaining the fundamental components, I’ve also designed the bare-bones architecture of a sports...
Leveraging the Backends for frontends pattern to avert API gateway from becoming a system bottleneck
In this system design series, I discuss the intricacies of designing distributed scalable systems and the related concepts. This will help you immensely with your software architecture and system design interview rounds, in addition to helping you become a better software engineer. Here is the first post...
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