#Architecture — ByteDepth

High Level Design

Choosing the Right Database

A practical decision framework for picking the right database in a system design interview — relational, key-value, wide-column, document, graph, time-series, search, and blob storage compared.

Sep 18, 2026

System Design Database Architecture

High Level Design

Design a Chat System

End-to-end design of a real-time chat system for 50M DAU — covering WebSocket protocol choice, message fanout, multi-device sync, presence management, and media storage.

Sep 18, 2026

System Design Chat WebSocket

High Level Design

Design a Video Streaming Service

End-to-end design of a YouTube-like video platform — uploading flow, adaptive streaming, DAG-based transcoding pipeline, CDN cost optimizations, pre-signed URLs, DRM, and fault-tolerant error handling.

Aug 21, 2026

System Design Video Streaming CDN

High Level Design

Designing an Email Service

End-to-end design of a scalable email service — service registration, 2FA authentication, global cache with sidecar pattern, API contracts, tagging, spam detection, full-text search with inverted index, and contacts/groups management.

Aug 21, 2026

System Design Email Notifications

High Level Design

Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture

A side-by-side comparison of monolithic and microservices architectures across scalability, deployment, fault isolation, team structure, and when to choose each.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Microservices Architecture

High Level Design

Scalability: The Basics

Core concepts of scalability — vertical vs horizontal scaling, components that improve it, and trade-offs every system designer must reason about.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Scalability Architecture

High Level Design

System Design Trade-offs

Pull vs Push, Memory vs Latency, Throughput vs Latency, Consistency vs Availability, Latency vs Accuracy — every key trade-off with decision frameworks.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Architecture Trade-offs

High Level Design

Designing a Key-Value Store

End-to-end design of a distributed key-value store — CAP theorem, consistent hashing, replication, conflict resolution with vector clocks, failure handling, and the detailed read/write path.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Database Key-Value Store

High Level Design

Designing a Load Balancer

End-to-end design of a production-grade load balancer — control and data planes, health checking, session persistence, SSL termination, and high-availability with active-active failover.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Load Balancing Scalability

High Level Design

Design a Notification System

End-to-end design of a scalable notification system — iOS/Android push, SMS, email, message queues for async delivery, reliability, deduplication, and the improved multi-server architecture.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Notifications Push

High Level Design

Designing a Unique ID Generator

Designing a distributed unique ID generator — comparing multi-master replication, UUID, ticket servers, and Twitter Snowflake, with a deep dive into the 64-bit Snowflake layout and follow-up considerations.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design Distributed Systems ID Generation

High Level Design

Designing a URL Shortener

End-to-end design of a URL shortening service — estimations, API design, 301 vs 302 redirects, hash functions with collision resolution, base62 encoding, and the deep-dive read/write paths.

Aug 10, 2026

System Design URL Shortener Hashing

High Level Design

Design a Rate Limiter

A comprehensive study guide to designing a production-grade rate limiter. Covers placement strategies, five core algorithms with trade-offs, high-level and detailed design, and distributed system challenges like race conditions and synchronization.

Aug 9, 2026

System Design Rate Limiting API Design

High Level Design

Design a News Feed System

Designing a scalable news feed system requires balancing: Write efficiency vs read latency Cache size vs data freshness Push vs pull models Throughput vs storage cost

Dec 1, 2025

System Design News Feed Social Media