Real-World Production Architectures
Explore the engineering internals and battle-tested distributed patterns that power the world's largest technology platforms.
All Topics in Phase 18
0 of 20 completedDeconstruct Netflix's AWS cloud migration: 1,000+ microservices, Zuul edge routing, Hystrix/Resilience4j fault tolerance, Titus container management, and Open Connect CDN.
Explore Amazon's 2002 Bezos Mandate: Service encapsulation, Two-Pizza teams, the seminal Dynamo paper (2007), and DynamoDB single-digit millisecond latency.
Manage microservice sprawl: Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture (DOMA), Domains/Layers/Gateways, Schemaless sharding, and H3 geospatial dispatching.
Scale with extreme engineering efficiency: 50 engineers serving 900M users, FreeBSD kernel tuning, Erlang BEAM actor model, and ephemeral message store.
Scale a Django monolith: Sharding PostgreSQL across thousands of logical shards, custom 64-bit ID generation, Memcached caching tiers, and async Celery workers.
Deliver exabytes of video: Video ingest pipeline, DAG transcoding workflows, custom VCU silicon, Vitess (sharded MySQL), and Google Global Cache (GGC).
Query the social graph: Objects & Associations, TAO read-through cache tiers, Leader-Follower cache consistency, and MySQL persistent backing stores.
Architect real-time social streams: Timeline service, Tweet ingestion, Fan-out on Write vs Read, Redis In-Memory timelines, and Snowflake IDs.
Unify enterprise data pipelines: Point-to-point integration gridlock, Kafka log-centric architecture, sequential disk I/O, zero-copy networking, and the Venice serving tier.
Search the entire web: Googlebot distributed crawler, Inverted Index shard distribution, PageRank link graph scoring, and sub-50ms query serving.
Map the physical world: Hilbert Space-Filling curves, Google S2 spherical geometry (Cell IDs), Quad-Trees, and routing algorithms (Contraction Hierarchies / A*).
Sync exabytes of user files: Client chunking engine, SQLite local metadata, Notification server (long-polling/WebSockets), and custom Magic Pocket hardware block storage.
Deconstruct Airbnb's evolution: The Monorail Ruby on Rails monolith, Strangler Fig SOA migration, Debezium CDC pipelines, and Elasticsearch listing search.
Power millions of simultaneous voice/text channels: Elixir BEAM processes, Rust NIF memory safety, migrating from Cassandra to ScyllaDB, and WebSocket gateway scaling.
Scale workplace messaging: Channel membership graphs, Flannel edge caching proxy, real-time message bus, and Vitess database sharding.
Process billions with zero financial errors: Idempotency keys, atomic state machines, double-entry bookkeeping ledgers, and dynamic acquirer routing.
Stream audio to millions: The Spotify Squad model, Ogg Vorbis chunking, migrating from P2P to CDN edge streaming, and Cassandra/Bigtable playlist storage.
Connect millions of simultaneous video callers: Custom UDP transport protocols, Multimedia Routing nodes (MMRs), Dynamic quality downgrading, and global edge POPs.
Solve the 3-sided marketplace: Real-time driver GPS tracking, kitchen prep time prediction, multi-order batching engines, and live WebSocket map animation.