System Design · Building Blocks

Core Building Blocks

The components that appear in almost every system at scale.

Building Block Topics

How traffic finds your system and gets distributed across servers.

Storing computed results to reduce latency and database load.

ACID transactions, indexes, and when SQL is still the right choice.

Document, key-value, column-family, and graph databases at scale.

Distributing data for fault tolerance and horizontal scale.

Decoupling producers and consumers for reliable async communication.

Serving static assets fast to users anywhere in the world.

The entry point of your system and the traffic management layer.

Inverted indexes, relevance scoring, and full-text search at scale.