By ScalaBrix – Production-grade System Architecture Insights
🚀 System Design Interview Playbook – Master Scalable Architecture, Distributed Systems & Real-World Patterns
Covering fundamentals, scalability strategies, database design, caching, and high-availability architectures — for both interview success and production excellence.
Learn how to build scalable systems, design fault-tolerant architectures, and apply real-world system design patterns to ace your next system design interview.
🛠 Build from core principles before diving into advanced systems.
📈 Progress logically from fundamentals → high-scale architectures → specialized patterns.
🎯 Focus your prep like an actual interview roadmap.
Your Journey:
1️⃣ Foundation Layer – Core building blocks & fundamentals
2️⃣ Data Mastery – Databases, caching & async workflows
3️⃣ Scale & Reliability – High-QPS, load balancing, fault tolerance
4️⃣ Domain Expertise – Real-world product architectures & case studies
Each article includes real-world trade-offs, scaling math, and production blueprints.
- 🏗 Fundamentals & Core Building Blocks
- 🗄 Database Design & High-Throughput Patterns
- ⚡ Caching, Invalidation & Read Path Acceleration
- 🧵 Async, Orchestration & Worker Architectures
- 🛰 Distributed Query, Logging & Analytics
- 📣 Feeds, Fan-Out & Notifications
- 🛡 Security, Zero-Trust & Governance
- 📶 Load Balancing, Backpressure & SLOs
- 🧭 Real-Time Detection, Counters & Monitoring
- 🧪 Code Execution, Contests & Scheduling
- 🏛 Domain Case Studies (Product Architectures)
- 🤖 Agent Era & Next-Gen Architectures
- 📊 Project Metrics
- 🤝 Contributing
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unlocking Scalability: Building Blocks (p1) | Read | Queues, Topics, Partitions, Consumer Groups, Offsets |  |
| 2 | Unlocking Scalability: Advanced Blocks (p2) | Read | Backpressure, DLQs, API reliability patterns | |
| 3 | Beyond Resilience: Operational Blocks (p3) | Read | Alerting, Auto-Scaling, Self-Healing ops | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DB Design: Multi-Tenant Data Isolation | Read | Tenant isolation in shared DBs without cost explosion | |
| 2 | Rethinking Database Access: Zero-Trust & IAM | Read | IAM tokens, least privilege, real-time auth to DB | |
| 3 | High Throughput Reads/Writes (Read-Write Separation) | Read | Split read vs write paths to hit 1M QPS | |
| 4 | High Throughput Reads/Writes (CQRS) | Read | CQRS patterns, failover & resiliency for DB scale | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Distributed Cache Invalidation Service | Read | Consistent invalidation across distributed nodes | |
| 2 | Client-Side Caching with ETag Validation | Read | Save server load with smart validation | |
| 3 | Cluster-Wide Cache Warm-Up Service | Read | Pre-warming strategies for cold-start & scale | |
| 4 | Read-Heavy Service w/ Regional Cache Replicas | Read | Geo-replicated read path, low latency design | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Designing Robust Asynchronous Operations (p1) | Read | End-to-end async flows, retries, backoffs | |
| 2 | Exactly-Once Processing for Distributed Workflows | Read | Idempotency, orchestration & compensation | |
| 3 | Auto-Scaling Worker Pools for Event Processing | Read | Feedback-driven elasticity, SLA-aware scaling | |
| 4 | Distributed Task Scheduling Service | Read | Highly scalable scheduler architecture | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Architecting Distributed Query Systems for Scale | Read | Search/filter/aggregate at massive scale | |
| 2 | Distributed Top-K IP Query at Web-Scale | Read | Find heavy hitters across 500M+ logs | |
| 3 | From Log Chaos to Order (Kafka Log Merging) | Read | Aggregating & streaming microservice logs | |
| 4 | Distributed Logging Systems at Scale (p1) | Read | Multi-tenant, cost-efficient log platform | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | System Design Twitter: Scaling Timeline Writes | Read | Fan-out-on-write at Twitter scale | |
| 2 | Fan-Out-on-Write (Blueprint) | Read | Single write → millions of timelines | |
| 3 | High-Performance Fan-Out-on-Read | Read | Deadline-bounded aggregation; partial failures | |
| 4 | Scaling Notification Fan-Out to 10M Devices | Read | Mobile push, batching, delivery guarantees | |
| 5 | How a Single Post Reaches Millions | Read | Per-stage payloads & latency math for fan-out | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rethinking DB Access: Zero-Trust & IAM Tokens | Read | Live, least-privilege access to data | |
| 2 | Distributed API Key Revocation Service | Read | Instant key revocation across infra | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enterprise-Grade Load Balancing Architecture | Read | Multi-layer LBs, failover, autoscaling, obs. | |
| 2 | Handling Backpressure in Video Streaming | Read | Smoothing producers/consumers under load | |
| 3 | Deep Dive into 1M RPS API Design | Read | Throughput, latency, HA & cost trade-offs | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Distributed Anomaly Count: Detecting API Spikes | Read | Multi-node spike/traffic surge detection | |
| 2 | Counting Every Click: Real-Time View Counters | Read | Live counters with accuracy & low latency | |
| 3 | Assigning 100K Unique Timestamps/sec | Read | Global ordering & clock contention control | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | On-Demand Code Execution System (Part 1) | Read | Event-driven workers, sandboxing, isolation | |
| 2 | On-Demand Code Execution System (Part 2) | Read | Secure execution, retries, failure workflows | |
| 3 | Coding Contest & Leaderboard | Read | Concurrency at scale, ranking pipelines | |
| 4 | Distributed Task Scheduling Service | Read | Time-based & event-driven scheduling at scale | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Payment Wallet | Read | Microservice design for wallet/payments | |
| 2 | Ticket Booking System | Read | Inventory, concurrency & seat locking | |
| 3 | Content Aggregator (News/Articles) | Read | Crawling, indexing, ranking, feeds | |
| 4 | Online Forum (Part 1) | Read | Real-time, caching & moderation flows | |
| # | Title | Link | What You’ll Learn | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Blueprint: Modern System Design for the Agent Era (2025+) | Read | Layered, production-ready agent platform | |
| 2 | Repackaging Microservices into Single-Tenant Monoliths | Read | Isolation + shared control/observability planes | |
| 3 | Distributed Prime Number Finder | Read | Billion-scale parallel compute blueprint | |
📢 Stay Ahead in System Design!
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🚀 Master the patterns. Ace the interview. Ship production systems with confidence.