System Design Interview Guides

Explore system design interview case studies that work through requirements, capacity reasoning, architecture choices, and failure handling. These guides pair well with hands-on architecture practice.

System Design: How to Design TinyURL (Architecture, Capacity & SPOF)

This guide walks through a URL-shortening system design, including requirements, example capacity estimates, database schema, Base62 key generation, caching strategies, and failover trade-offs.

System Design: How to Design an API Rate Limiter (Token Bucket vs Leaky Bucket)

This guide explores a distributed API rate limiter design, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Sliding Window Counter, synchronization across gateways, Redis scripting, capacity estimation, and failure-mode trade-offs.

System Design: How to Design a Notification System at Scale (SMS, Push, Email)

This guide explores a notification-service design for push, SMS, and email, including priority queues, idempotency, rate limiting, provider integrations, and operational trade-offs.

Practice system design on the interactive architecture canvas

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