System Design · Case Studies
Case Study: Notification System
Design, trade-offs, and alternatives for a notification system at scale.
01
Chapter One
Problem Statement
Problem Statement
Coming Soon
Problem Statement
This chapter covers notification system scale: daily active users, push/email/SMS volume, delivery latency SLA.
📋 Chapter 1 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
02
Chapter Two
Questions to Ask
Questions to Ask
Coming Soon
Questions to Ask
This chapter covers key questions: priority tiers, deduplication, opt-out handling, delivery receipts, retry policy.
📋 Chapter 2 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
03
Chapter Three
Naive Design
Naive Design
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Naive Design
This chapter covers synchronous notification sending in the user request path and its failure modes.
📋 Chapter 3 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
04
Chapter Four
Refined Design
Refined Design
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Refined Design
This chapter covers async queue-based architecture with separate workers per channel and retry dead-letter queues.
📋 Chapter 4 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
05
Chapter Five
Alternatives
Alternatives
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Alternatives
This chapter covers two approaches: single unified queue vs per-channel queues — trade-offs in complexity and isolation.
📋 Chapter 5 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
06
Chapter Six
Real Companies
Real Companies
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Real Companies
This chapter covers how LinkedIn, Facebook, and Airbnb handle notification delivery at scale.
📋 Chapter 6 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
07
Chapter Seven
Best Practices
Best Practices
Coming Soon
Best Practices
This chapter covers idempotent sends, user preference center, priority queuing for critical alerts.
📋 Chapter 7 — Summary
- Summary content pending.
08
Chapter Eight
What Could Go Wrong
What Could Go Wrong
Coming Soon
What Could Go Wrong
This chapter covers duplicate notifications, silent delivery failures, device token staleness, and notification fatigue.
📋 Chapter 8 — Summary
- Summary content pending.