CDN System Request Lifecycle Visualization
Explore an 18-step CDN walkthrough covering Anycast and GeoDNS routing, cache keys, cacheability, request coalescing, validators, stale serving, failover, purge propagation
System Design
Build intuition for large-scale system design — from URL shorteners and chat systems to payment platforms and video streaming architectures.
28 guides 25 visualizations 3 simulators
Visualizations 25 visualizations
Chat System Message Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through a horizontally scaled chat system from initial load balancing and heartbeat keepalives through presence registry lookup, cross-gateway Pub/Sub, receipts, offline queueing
Cloud Storage System (Google Drive/Dropbox)
Understand how cloud storage systems like Google Drive and Dropbox sync files. Explore block-level chunking, content-based deduplication, delta sync, push notifications
Code Deployment System
Explore the end-to-end flow of a production-grade deployment system. Learn the mechanics of rolling updates, Blue-Green swaps, Canary routing, and automated rollbacks.
Collaborative Editor System Design
Learn how a real-time collaborative editor keeps multiple people on the same document without making typing feel slow.
Distributed Message Queue (Kafka Deep-Dive)
Explore Kafka as a distributed commit log through a 14-step visualization covering producer batching, partition leaders, ISR, high watermark, consumer offsets, failover, recovery
Distributed Unique ID Generator
Explore how a distributed unique ID generator packs timestamp, node identity, and sequence bits into one signed 64-bit integer.
Food Delivery Fulfillment Lifecycle
Follow a food delivery order through checkout, restaurant acceptance, courier dispatch, pickup, live tracking, and customer notification.
Food Delivery Fulfillment Lifecycle
Walk through the lifecycle of a food delivery order from checkout through restaurant acceptance, courier offers, pickup, tracking, and final customer notification.
Hotel Reservation Concurrency
Understand concurrency control in a hotel reservation system. Learn how inventory check, pessimistic locking, optimistic locking, idempotent payments, ledger logging
How to Design a System Like Instagram
A 19-step interactive guide to six Instagram-scale outcomes: media uploads, feed generation, bounded cache recovery, Reels ranking, direct messaging, and live delivery.
Instagram Feed and Media Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through Instagram's feed and media lifecycle from upload to image processing, metadata commit, hybrid feed fan-out, Redis inbox reads, CDN media fill, cache stampede degradation
Key-Value Store Dynamo Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through a Dynamo-style distributed key-value store lifecycle: consistent hashing, quorum writes and reads, LSM storage, vector clocks, hinted handoff, gossip recovery
News Feed System Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through a scale-out news feed lifecycle from publishing and moderation to fan-out, timeline cache reads, hydration, ranking, and recovery.
Notification System Delivery Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through a scalable notification system from event intake and queue buffering through priority handling, preference checks, idempotency, provider dispatch, opt-out drops, retry backoff
Object Storage PUT/GET Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through an S3-like object storage system from PUT validation and multipart upload through erasure coding, metadata manifest commit, GET reads, drive failure, self-healing rebuild
Pastebin System Design
Explore the system design of a Pastebin service. Follow the step-by-step walkthrough to see how Base62 Key Generation (KGS), S3 Object Storage, Relational Database Metadata indexing
Payment System (Stripe)
Explore a Stripe-style PaymentIntent lifecycle, visualizing idempotency, client secrets, authentication, authorization, capture, webhooks, ledger posting, and reconciliation.
Search Autocomplete (Typeahead) System
Understand the end-to-end architecture of a low-latency Search Autocomplete/Typeahead system. Explore SQL limits, debouncing, Trie data structures, MapReduce aggregations, range sharding
TikTok Recommendation and Delivery System
Walk through a TikTok-style short-video platform from creator upload through encoder output, Object Storage arrival, item embeddings, Two-Tower ranking, CDN pre-fetching, viewer playback, and feedback recovery.
URL Shortener System Design
Walk through a URL shortener from long URL submission and Base62 code generation through collision checks, sharded storage, redirect resolution, browser and Redis caching, shard failure
Web Crawler System Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through a distributed web crawler lifecycle from seed URLs to URL frontier scheduling, robots.txt policy, DNS resolution, fetching, parsing, Bloom filter dedupe, spider trap handling
WebRTC Video Conferencing (Zoom)
Understand the architectural components of video conferencing systems like Zoom. Follow call signaling, STUN/TURN network traversal, Mesh vs. SFU vs. MCU topologies
Yelp (Proximity / Location-Based Service)
Learn how proximity and location-based services like Yelp scale. Visualize geospatial database queries, geohashing, QuadTree partitioning, 8-neighbor proximity searches, geospatial caching
YouTube Video Streaming Lifecycle Visualization
Walk through a YouTube-style video streaming lifecycle from chunked upload to transcoding, HLS/DASH manifests, CDN edge fills, ABR playback, Kafka view events, batch counters
Simulators 3 simulators
Reactive Architecture Builder
Build a typed software architecture, change realistic capacity settings, and watch overload, backpressure, and Kubernetes recovery propagate through the system.
Ride-Sharing Service (Uber/Lyft)
Explore geospatial indexing (Geohash vs QuadTree), real-time driver coordinates streaming, surge pricing dynamic feedback loops, and transactional trip matching states.
Stock Exchange System Design
Explore LMAX Disruptor sequencing, pre-trade risk validations, FIFO Limit Order Book matching, UDP multicast publishers, and market circuit breakers.