Subject
System design
How large systems are put together and why. Five articles, meant to be read in order: each one starts with a mind map for fast revision, then explains every concept with a diagram and the real systems that use it.
Articles
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1 · Networking and edge routing
One request's journey: DNS, anycast, CDNs, load balancers, proxies, API gateways, and real-time connections.
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2 · Scalability and compute patterns
Horizontal and vertical scaling, microservices, statelessness, concurrency models, queues and batching.
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3 · Storage and data systems
Choosing a data model, sharding, replication, indexes, caching, consistent hashing, denormalization and write-ahead logs.
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4 · Distributed consensus and reliability
CAP and PACELC, Raft, idempotency, circuit breakers, rate limiting, backoff with jitter, heartbeats and failover.
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5 · Observability and system security
Metrics, traces and logs, SLOs and error budgets, authentication, authorization and encryption.