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Hyperscalers — petabyte data, billion+ users, novel infra
Real-time delivery at planetary scale
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spotify | engineering.atspotify.com | Backstage, event delivery, ML for music | Fleet-First Mindset · ML Personalization · DevOps Productivity |
| Twitch | blog.twitch.tv | Live video, chat, low-latency streaming | Live Video at Global Scale · Chat Infrastructure |
| Disney+ Hotstar | blog.hotstar.com | Live cricket scaling, 25M concurrent | Billion Emojis · 25M Concurrent Streams · Live Cricket Architecture |
| SoundCloud | developers.soundcloud.com/blog | Audio storage, streaming infra | Audio Pipeline · Stream Processing |
Strict consistency, idempotency, and ledger correctness
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | stripe.com/blog/engineering | Idempotency, API Design | Online Migrations · Idempotency Keys · Rate Limiters |
| PayPal | medium.com/paypal-tech | Fraud detection, cluster management | GraphQL at PayPal · Fraud ML Pipeline · Checkout Architecture |
| Block (Square) | developer.squareup.com/blog | Point-of-sale infra, Cash App scale | POS Architecture · Cash App Scaling |
| Coinbase | coinbase.com/blog/engineering | Crypto custody, exchange architecture | Blockchain Infra · Exchange Architecture |
| Robinhood | robinhood.engineering | Trading platforms, market data | Trading System · Market Data Pipeline |
| Wise | medium.com/wise-engineering | Cross-border payments, FX, ledgers | Multi-Currency Ledger · FX Rate Engine |
| Monzo | monzo.com/blog/technology | 1500+ Microservices | 100+ Deploys/Day · Modern Bank Backend |
Catalog, search, recommendations, checkout at scale
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | shopify.engineering | Black Friday Scaling, Rails at scale | Deconstructing Monolith · BFCM Scaling · Resiliency at Scale |
| eBay | innovation.ebayinc.com | Search, payments, billion-listing catalog | Search at Scale · Catalog Architecture |
| Etsy | etsy.com/codeascraft | Continuous Deployment, A/B testing | Feature Flags · Experimentation Platform · Search Ranking |
| Airbnb | medium.com/airbnb-engineering | Airflow, search ranking, payments | Avoiding Double Payments · Dynein Job Queue · Search Ranking ML |
| medium.com/Pinterest_Engineering | Recommendation system, image search | Real-Time Recommendations · Visual Search · Ads Serving | |
| Instacart | tech.instacart.com | ML for grocery, real-time inventory | ML Fulfillment · Real-Time Inventory |
| Zalando | engineering.zalando.com | K8s in Production | Microservices at Scale · Running K8s |
Geo-spatial, real-time matching, dispatch
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uber | uber.com/blog/engineering | H3 Geo, Cadence, Michelangelo | Big Data Platform · H3 Hexagonal Grid · Fulfillment Rearchitecture |
| Lyft | eng.lyft.com | Envoy Proxy, Flyte, ML platform | Scaling Microservices · Envoy at Scale · ML Platform |
| DoorDash | doordash.engineering/blog | Logistics, on-time delivery ML | Notifications Platform · Delivery ETA ML · Search & Discovery |
| Grab | engineering.grab.com | Super-app, Southeast Asia scale | Real-Time Data Platform · Dispatch System |
| Swiggy | bytes.swiggy.com | India-scale food delivery, real-time | Delivery Optimization · Restaurant Search |
The platforms others build on
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | blog.cloudflare.com | Edge Compute, DDoS, networking | Prometheus at Scale · DDoS Mitigation · Workers Architecture |
| HashiCorp | hashicorp.com/blog | Terraform, Vault, Consul | IaC Best Practices · Service Mesh with Consul |
| Datadog | datadoghq.com/blog/engineering | Observability infra, time-series at scale | Husky Column Store · Metrics at Scale · Tracing Architecture |
| GitHub | github.blog/engineering | DB Partitioning, Actions | Actions Internals · DB Partitioning · Copilot Architecture |
| GitLab | about.gitlab.com/blog | Monorepo dev, CI/CD platform | CI/CD Architecture · Database Scaling |
Storage engines, query planners, ML platforms
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confluent | confluent.io/blog | Exactly-Once, KRaft | Choosing Partitions · Exactly-Once Deep Dive · Event Streaming Patterns |
| Databricks | databricks.com/blog | Delta Lake, Spark, lakehouse | What is a Lakehouse? · Delta Lake Internals · Photon Engine |
| MongoDB | mongodb.com/blog | WiredTiger, distributed transactions | Sharding Internals · Change Streams · WiredTiger Deep Dive |
| Elastic | elastic.co/blog/engineering | Lucene Internals, search relevance | ES from Bottom Up · Inverted Index · Cluster Scaling |
| CockroachDB | cockroachlabs.com/blog | Distributed SQL, Raft, MVCC | Living Without Atomic Clocks · Raft Made Simple · MVCC Explained |
| PlanetScale | planetscale.com/blog | Vitess, MySQL at scale | How Read Replicas Work · Online Schema Changes · Vitess Architecture |
| Redis | redis.io/blog | Data structures server, persistence | Cluster Internals · Persistence Strategies · Pub/Sub at Scale |
| OpenAI | openai.com/research | LLM scaling, RLHF, infra for GPT | K8s to 7500 Nodes · Scaling Laws for LLMs · Training Infrastructure |
Booking, search, large-vendor integration
| Company | Blog | Known for | Popular Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | blog.booking.com | Experimentation platform, search | A/B Testing at Scale · Search Architecture · ML for Pricing |
| Expedia | medium.com/expedia-group-tech | Travel APIs, microservices migration | Microservices Migration · GraphQL Federation |
| Trivago | tech.trivago.com | Hotel search, comparison engines | Search Architecture · Price Comparison Engine |
| Yelp | engineeringblog.yelp.com | Search ranking, review fraud detection | Real-Time Data Pipeline · Fraud Detection ML · Search Ranking |
Hand-picked deep-dive newsletters and digests for system design prep
| Source | Link | What you get | Why Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| ByteByteGo | blog.bytebytego.com | Visual system design weekly | Best visual explanations of complex systems |
| High Scalability | highscalability.com | Real architectures (classic) | Case studies from real production systems |
| The Pragmatic Engineer | pragmaticengineer.com | Industry insights, eng leadership | Staff+ career growth and system design |
| InfoQ | infoq.com/architecture-design | Conference talks, architecture trends | QCon talks and architecture deep dives |
| The Morning Paper | blog.acolyer.org | Daily CS paper summaries (archive) | Accessible summaries of foundational papers |
| Papers We Love | paperswelove.org | Classic CS papers + meetups | Raft, Paxos, Dynamo papers explained |
| DDIA Companion | github.com/ept/ddia-references | Designing Data-Intensive Apps refs | All references from the DDIA book |
| Awesome Scalability | awesome-scalability | Mega list of scaling case studies | One-stop link collection for interview prep |
Social, Comms & Productivity
Real-time, collaborative, chat at scale