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...
Why Stack Overflow Picked Svelte for their Overflow AI Feature And the Website UI
Stack Overflow is a .NET-based monolithic application with JQuery heavily used on the UI along with the Razor templating engine for creating dynamic web pages. JQuery in today’s UI dev landscape has almost phased out. Modern browsers have evolved their native APIs to the point...
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...
‘Futures and Promises’ – How Instagram leverages it for better resource utilization
Futures and Promises is a concept that enables a process to execute asynchronously, improving performance and resource consumption. It can be applied in multiple contexts, such as in request-response in a web service call, long-running computations, database queries, remote procedure calls, interservice communication in distributed...
McDonald’s Event-Driven Architecture – A Gist
McDonald’s uses events across their distributed architecture for use cases such as asynchronous, transactional and analytical processing, including mobile-order progress tracking and sending marketing offers like deals and promotions to their customers. As opposed to building event streaming solutions for every individual or a set...
Live Video Streaming Infrastructure at Twitch
Twitch engineering developed a scalable, HA live streaming solution to enable broadcasters on their platform live stream their gameplay with minimum latency. The live streaming solution (developed by Twitch) is also made available as a Service to the world through AWS IVS (Interactive Video Streaming)...
What Do 100 Million Users On A Google Service Mean? – System Design for Scale and High Availability
Imagine a simple service with an API server and a database. Now when this service is owned by Google, the traffic is expected to be in the scale of 100 million users. That means: 10 billion requests/day 100k requests/second (average) 200k requests/second (peak) 2 million...
How Razorpay handled significant transaction bursts during events like IPL
Razorpay is India’s leading payment-gateway service that offers a suite of products to businesses to accept, process and disburse payments enabling them to establish an online presence. They dealt with an interesting problem: the problem of sudden transaction bursts during events such as the Indian...
Facebook’s photo storage architecture
Facebook built Haystack, an object storage system designed for storing photos on a large scale. The platform stores over 260 billion images which amounts to over 20 petabytes of data. One billion new photos are uploaded each week which is approx—60 terabytes of data. At...
Application Hosting – How PolyHaven Manages 5 Million Page Views and 80TB Traffic a Month for < $400
Polyhaven, a 3D asset library, recently provided insightful data on how they manage to serve 5 million page views a month, consuming a bandwidth of 80 terabytes just under 400 USD. If the same amount of traffic was served from AWS S3 object storage, that would cost more than 4K USD a month. So how do...
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