The Ultimate Guide to Federated Architecture & Decentralized Social Networks
Hello there, everyoneHow is it going?Welcome to scaleyourapp.com This article is a comprehensive write-up on Federated architecture, decentralized social networks & how federated architecture is important to decentralized social networks. Before I get started, it’s kind of beneficial to have an understanding of decentralized, centralized architectures…
Difference Between Centralized, Decentralized & Distributed Systems Oversimplified
This article is a comprehensive write-up on centralized, decentralized & distributed systems. What are they? What are the differences between them? How do these terms fit into software design? Isn’t decentralized & distributed the same thing? Can they be used synonymously? Let’s talk everything about them….
UUID GUID Oversimplified – Are they Really Unique?
Hello there,How are you doing? Welcome to scaleyourapp.comThis write-up is a comprehensive guide to UUID & GUID. It answers pretty much all our questions on the topic. What is a UUID? a GUID? What is the difference between them? Are they really unique? How do…
What is a Bit? & A Byte? – A Helpful Guide In Simple Words
Hey!! How are you doing?Welcome to scaleyourapp.comToday we are talking about the fundamentals… About the Bits & the Bytes.What is a bit? & what does it mean in computing? “This line you just read” uses somewhere around 400 bits of storage memory. There are so…
Procedural Generation – A Comprehensive Guide Put in Simple Words
Hey there!! How are you doing?Welcome to scaleyourapp.com This article is a comprehensive write-up on procedural generation. A really cool technique of algorithmically generating content with minimal effort. By the end of this article, we’ll be able to answer all the questions about it such…
Distributed Systems and Scalability Feed
Facebook 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 peak, the platform serves over one million images per second.
In the original NAS-based photo storage architecture, Facebook faced throughput and latency issues as the photos and the associated metadata lookups in NAS caused excessive disk operations almost upto ten just for retrieving a single image.

Tail latency in distributed systems
Tail latency is that tiny percentage of responses from a system that are the slowest in comparison to most of the responses. They are often called as the 98th or 99th percentile response times. This may seem insignificant at first but for large applications like LinkedIn, this has noticeable effects. This could mean that for a page having a million views per day 10,000 of those page views would experience the delay. Read how LinkedIn deals with longtail network latencies.
There can be multiple causes of tail latency: increasing load on the system, complex and distributed systems, application bottlenecks, slow network, slow disk access and more. Read more on it.
RobinHood: Tail latency-aware caching
RobinHood is a research caching system for application servers in large distributed systems having diverse backends. The cache system dynamically partitions the cache space between different backend services and continuously optimizes the partition sizes.
Microsoft research has a talk on getting rid of long-tail latencies.
Zero to Software Architect Learning Track - Starting from Zero to Designing Web-Scale Distributed Applications Like a Pro. Check it out.
Master system design for your interviews. Check out this blog post written by me.
Zero to Software Architect Learning Track - Starting from Zero to Designing Web-Scale Distributed Applications Like a Pro. Check it out.
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