System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide (Vol 1 and 2)

These notes are based on the System Design Interview books - Vol 1 and Vol 2 2nd Ed

Check the notes here: https://system-design-notes-docs.vercel.app

Note: These notes are a work in progress.

🌐 Progressive Web App (PWA) & Offline Notes

This repository includes a full-featured Progressive Web App (PWA) built with VitePress with full-text search and complete offline support:

• 📱 Installable PWA: Can be installed directly to your home screen or desktop (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Android, iOS).
• ⚡ 100% Offline Browsing: Pre-caches all 28 chapters, diagrams, SVGs, and fonts locally upon initial load so you can read seamlessly without an internet connection.
• 🔄 Auto-Updating Service Worker: Automatically fetches updates when online.

# Run locally
npm install
npm run docs:dev

# Build for production with service worker & precache (e.g. Vercel / Netlify / GitHub Pages)
npm run docs:build

# Preview production build locally
npm run docs:preview

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📚 Chapters (in NOTES/)

• Chapter 1 - Scale From Zero To Millions Of Users
• Chapter 2 - Back-of-the-envelope Estimation
• Chapter 3 - A Framework For System Design Interviews
• Chapter 4 - Design A Rate Limiter
• Chapter 5 - Design Consistent Hashing
• Chapter 6 - Design A Key-Value Store
• Chapter 7 - Design A Unique ID Generator In Distributed Systems
• Chapter 8 - Design A URL Shortener
• Chapter 9 - Design A Web Crawler
• Chapter 10 - Design A Notification System
• Chapter 11 - Design A News Feed System
• Chapter 12 - Design A Chat System
• Chapter 13 - Design A Search Autocomplete System
• Chapter 14 - Design YouTube
• Chapter 15 - Design Google Drive
• Chapter 16 - Proximity Service
• Chapter 17 - Nearby Friends
• Chapter 18 - Design Google Maps
• Chapter 19 - Distributed Message Queue
• Chapter 20 - Metrics Monitoring and Alerting System
• Chapter 21 - Ad Click Event Aggregation
• Chapter 22 - Hotel Reservation System
• Chapter 23 - Distributed Email Service
• Chapter 24 - S3-like Object Storage
• Chapter 25 - Real-time Gaming Leaderboard
• Chapter 26 - Payment System
• Chapter 27 - Digital Wallet
• Chapter 28 - Stock Exchange

Additonal Resources

Rate Limiting

• Circuit Breaker Algorithm
• Uber Rate Limiter

Consistent Hashing

• Consistent Hashing
• CS168: Introduction and Consistent Hashing:
• Apache Cassandra
• Scaling Discord
• Google Maglev

Key-Value Store

• Amazon Dynamo
• Cassandra Architecture
• Google BigTable Architecture
• Amazon Dynamo DB Internals
• Design Patterns in Amazon Dynamo DB
• Internals of Amazon Dynamo DB

Unique-ID Generator

• Ticket Servers: Distributed Unique Primary Keys on the Cheap
• Snowflake

Web Crawler

• Web Crawling
• Google Dynamic Rendering

Chat Systems

• How Discord stores billions of messages
• Flannel: An Application-Level Edge Cache to Make Slack Scale

Search Autocomplete

• How We Built Prefixy
• Prefix Hash Tree

Youtube

• YouTube Architecture
• YouTube scalability 2012
• Transcoding Videos at Scale
• Facebook Video Broadcasting
• Netflix Video Encoding at Scale
• Netflix Shot based encoding

Google Drive

• Differential Synchronization
• Differential Synchronization Video
• How We’ve Scaled Dropbox