system-design-primer-update
system design interview questions
Common system design interview questions, with links to resources on how to solve each.
| Question | Reference(s) |
|---|---|
| Design a file sync service like Dropbox | youtube.com |
| Design a search engine like Google | queue.acm.org stackexchange.com ardendertat.com stanford.edu |
| Design a scalable web crawler like Google | quora.com |
| Design Google docs | code.google.com neil.fraser.name |
| Design a key-value store like Redis | slideshare.net |
| Design a cache system like Memcached | slideshare.net |
| Design a recommendation system like Amazon’s | hulu.com ijcai13.org |
| Design a tinyurl system like Bitly | n00tc0d3r.blogspot.com |
| Design a chat app like WhatsApp | highscalability.com |
| Design a picture sharing system like Instagram | highscalability.com highscalability.com |
| Design the Facebook news feed function | quora.com quora.com slideshare.net |
| Design the Facebook timeline function | facebook.com highscalability.com |
| Design the Facebook chat function | erlang-factory.com facebook.com |
| Design a graph search function like Facebook’s | facebook.com facebook.com facebook.com |
| Design a content delivery network like CloudFlare | figshare.com |
| Design a trending topic system like Twitter’s | michael-noll.com snikolov .wordpress.com |
| Design a random ID generation system | blog.twitter.com github.com |
| Return the top k requests during a time interval | cs.ucsb.edu wpi.edu |
| Design a system that serves data from multiple data centers | highscalability.com |
| Design an online multiplayer card game | indieflashblog.com buildnewgames.com |
| Design a garbage collection system | stuffwithstuff.com washington.edu |
| Design an API rate limiter | https://stripe.com/blog/ |
| Design a Stock Exchange (like NASDAQ or Binance) | Jane Street Golang Implementation Go Implementation |
| Add a system design question | Contribute |
Real world architectures
Articles on how real world systems are designed.
<a href=https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Twitter-Timeline-Scalability>Source: Twitter timelines at scale</a>
Don’t focus on nitty gritty details for the following articles, instead:
- Identify shared principles, common technologies, and patterns within these articles
- Study what problems are solved by each component, where it works, where it doesn’t
- Review the lessons learned
| Type | System | Reference(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Data processing | MapReduce - Distributed data processing from Google | research.google.com |
| Data processing | Spark - Distributed data processing from Databricks | slideshare.net |
| Data processing | Storm - Distributed data processing from Twitter | slideshare.net |
| Data store | Bigtable - Distributed column-oriented database from Google | harvard.edu |
| Data store | HBase - Open source implementation of Bigtable | slideshare.net |
| Data store | Cassandra - Distributed column-oriented database from Facebook | slideshare.net |
| Data store | DynamoDB - Document-oriented database from Amazon | harvard.edu |
| Data store | MongoDB - Document-oriented database | slideshare.net |
| Data store | Spanner - Globally-distributed database from Google | research.google.com |
| Data store | Memcached - Distributed memory caching system | slideshare.net |
| Data store | Redis - Distributed memory caching system with persistence and value types | slideshare.net |
| File system | Google File System (GFS) - Distributed file system | research.google.com |
| File system | Hadoop File System (HDFS) - Open source implementation of GFS | apache.org |
| Misc | Chubby - Lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems from Google | research.google.com |
| Misc | Dapper - Distributed systems tracing infrastructure | research.google.com |
| Misc | Kafka - Pub/sub message queue from LinkedIn | slideshare.net |
| Misc | Zookeeper - Centralized infrastructure and services enabling synchronization | slideshare.net |
| Add an architecture | Contribute |
Company architectures
Company engineering blogs
Architectures for companies you are interviewing with.
Questions you encounter might be from the same domain.
- Airbnb Engineering
- Atlassian Developers
- AWS Blog
- Bitly Engineering Blog
- Box Blogs
- Cloudera Developer Blog
- Dropbox Tech Blog
- Engineering at Quora
- Ebay Tech Blog
- Evernote Tech Blog
- Etsy Code as Craft
- Facebook Engineering
- Flickr Code
- Foursquare Engineering Blog
- GitHub Engineering Blog
- Google Research Blog
- Groupon Engineering Blog
- Heroku Engineering Blog
- Hubspot Engineering Blog
- High Scalability
- Instagram Engineering
- Intel Software Blog
- Jane Street Tech Blog
- LinkedIn Engineering
- Microsoft Engineering
- Microsoft Python Engineering
- Netflix Tech Blog
- Paypal Developer Blog
- Pinterest Engineering Blog
- Reddit Blog
- Salesforce Engineering Blog
- Slack Engineering Blog
- Spotify Labs
- Stripe Engineering Blog
- Twilio Engineering Blog
- Twitter Engineering
- Uber Engineering Blog
- Yahoo Engineering Blog
- Yelp Engineering Blog
- Zynga Engineering Blog
Source(s) and further reading
Looking to add a blog? To avoid duplicating work, consider adding your company blog to the following repo:
Under development
Interested in adding a section or helping complete one in-progress? Contribute!
- Distributed computing with MapReduce
- Consistent hashing
- Scatter gather
- Contribute