Abid Al Amin

System Design

System Design Practices

Deep dives into designing scalable, reliable backend systems — from the first requirement to the final trade-off.

  1. 01Problem & requirements
  2. 02Capacity estimation
  3. 03API and data model
  4. 04Architecture & deep dive
  5. 05Failure, scale, trade-offs

Showing 5 of 5 system designs

  • Storage

    10M users, 500TB stored, 200K uploads/hour peak

    Designing a File Storage System

    Design a file storage and sync service like Dropbox: chunking, deduplication, metadata separation, and multi-device sync.

    beginner16 min read

  • Scalability

    500K requests/sec gateway-wide, 100K unique clients

    Designing a Rate Limiter

    Design a distributed rate limiter for an API gateway: algorithm choice, distributed counters, and protecting shared backends under load.

    intermediate22 min read

  • Real-time

    50M DAU, 2M concurrent connections, 15B messages/day

    Designing a Chat System

    Design a real-time chat system like WhatsApp or Slack: connection management, message ordering, delivery guarantees, and fan-out at scale.

    advanced35 min read

  • Messaging

    10M notifications/day, 350 QPS peak

    Designing a Notification System

    Design a scalable notification system supporting email, SMS and push, with fan-out, retries, and per-channel rate limits.

    intermediate28 min read

  • Storage

    100M new URLs/month, 8K redirects/sec peak

    Designing a URL Shortener

    Design a URL shortening service like Bitly: encoding schemes, redirect latency, and read-heavy caching at scale.

    beginner18 min read