Architecture studies

Learn systems through the products engineers already recognize.

Each study starts with the production pain: traffic spikes, stale reads, hot partitions, retries, queues, consistency boundaries, and failure modes. The goal is not to memorize a diagram. The goal is to understand why the architecture had to evolve.

Study roadmap

5

Live

11

Planned

Coming soon cards are intentionally not linked yet. They mark the direction of the knowledgebase without pretending unfinished systems are ready to study.

5 live11 planned

01

TinyURL / Bitly-Style URL Shortener

Live

Low-latency redirects, short-code generation, hot links, abuse controls, and asynchronous analytics.

redirect pathcache pressureanalytics fan-out
Open architecture study

02

Instagram Likes System

Live

High-write engagement counters, idempotent likes, fan-out pressure, derived projections, and eventual consistency.

idempotencydistributed countersprojection drift
Open architecture study

03

WhatsApp-Style Messaging System

Live

Realtime gateways, offline delivery, receipts, ordering, media handoff, group fan-out, and multi-device sync.

delivery guaranteessync cursorsgroup fan-out
Open architecture study

04

Twitter/X Real-Time Search System

Live

Fresh indexing, inverted indexes, ranking, shards, replicas, query fan-out, and near-real-time updates.

inverted indexfreshnessquery fan-out
Open architecture study

05

Uber-Style Ride Matching System

Live

Location streams, geospatial indexing, dispatch decisions, driver state, surge pressure, and consistency tradeoffs.

geo indexingdispatchstate freshness
Open architecture study

06

Google Drive / Dropbox File Sync System

Soon

Chunking, metadata sync, version history, conflict resolution, delta transfer, and offline-first clients.

file chunkssync cursorsconflicts
Roadmap study

07

YouTube / Netflix Video Streaming System

Soon

Upload pipelines, transcoding, adaptive bitrate playback, CDN placement, metadata, and watch analytics.

transcodingCDNadaptive bitrate
Roadmap study

08

Stripe-Style Payment System

Soon

Idempotent payment attempts, ledgers, webhooks, retries, fraud checks, reconciliation, and money movement guarantees.

idempotencyledgerreconciliation
Roadmap study

09

Cloudflare-Style Global Rate Limiter

Soon

Edge enforcement, distributed counters, token buckets, hot keys, abusive traffic, and eventually consistent limits.

edge limitstoken buckethot keys
Roadmap study

10

Instagram / WhatsApp Notification System

Soon

Preference checks, fan-out, deduplication, delivery channels, push handoff, retries, and notification fatigue.

fan-outdedupepush delivery
Roadmap study

11

Twitter/X News Feed System

Soon

Timeline generation, ranking, fan-out-on-write, fan-out-on-read, celebrity users, caches, and freshness pressure.

timeline cachesrankingcelebrity users
Roadmap study

12

Amazon-Style Inventory Reservation System

Soon

Stock reservations, oversell prevention, carts, payment windows, concurrency, compensations, and reconciliation.

reservationsconcurrencyreconciliation
Roadmap study

13

Figma-Style Collaborative Editing System

Soon

Realtime collaboration, document operations, conflict handling, presence, version history, and multiplayer consistency.

presenceoperationsconflicts
Roadmap study

14

Datadog-Style Metrics Ingestion System

Soon

High-volume writes, time-series storage, aggregation, cardinality control, query serving, and alerting latency.

time seriescardinalityaggregation
Roadmap study

15

Zoom-Style Video Conferencing System

Soon

Media sessions, SFUs, signaling, adaptive quality, packet loss, regional routing, and meeting reliability.

SFUsignalingpacket loss
Roadmap study

16

Gmail-Style Email Delivery System

Soon

Mail ingestion, spam filtering, inbox indexing, threads, search, delivery retries, and storage at massive scale.

spam filteringindexingdelivery retries
Roadmap study