System DesignScaling patterns
System design scaling patterns
The cross-cutting patterns that system design answers keep reusing, from fan-out and hot keys to idempotency, retries, backpressure and multi-region, each with the numbers that decide between variants.
7 topics.
- 01Mid-levelReadFan-out on write vs fan-out on readPush to inboxes or pull at read time, and the celebrity hybrid.
- 02Mid-levelReadIdempotency and exactly-once effectsMake every hop safe to repeat, from client retries to webhooks.
- 03Mid-levelReadTimeouts, retries and circuit breakersStop one slow dependency from taking the whole system down.
- 04SeniorReadHot keys and hot partitionsDetect the key melting one shard, then cache, salt or shed it.
- 05SeniorReadCQRS and materialized viewsSeparate read models fed by events, with lag and rebuilds handled.
- 06SeniorReadBackpressure and load sheddingBounded queues, pull-based flow and shedding by priority.
- 07SeniorReadMulti-region and active-activeDR tiers, home regions, multi-leader writes and failover math.
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