Category System Design

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a critical technique in distributed systems for identifying, capturing, and propagating changes (inserts, updates, deletes) in a database to downstream systems in real time or near real time. It enables applications to maintain data consistency, support…

Rate limiting is a critical technique in distributed systems to control the rate of incoming requests, ensuring system stability, preventing abuse, and maintaining fair resource allocation. It is essential for high-traffic applications like APIs (e.g., Twitter, PayPal), web services (e.g.,…

Load balancing is a fundamental technique in distributed systems design, aimed at distributing incoming network traffic across multiple backend servers or nodes to optimize resource utilization, minimize response time, maximize throughput, and ensure high availability. In high-traffic applications, such as…

Introduction GeoHashing is a hierarchical spatial indexing technique that encodes geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) into a compact, alphanumeric string, enabling efficient storage, indexing, and querying of geospatial data in distributed systems. It is widely used in applications requiring location-based services,…

Introduction In distributed systems, ensuring data integrity—the assurance that data remains accurate, consistent, and unaltered during transmission, storage, or processing—is critical for reliability and trust in applications like e-commerce (e.g., Amazon), financial systems (e.g., PayPal), or streaming platforms (e.g., Netflix). Checksums are a…

Introduction A single point of failure (SPOF) refers to any component in a system—such as a node, service, network link, or database—whose failure can cause the entire system to become unavailable or degrade significantly. In distributed systems, where scalability, reliability, and high…

Introduction Distributed systems, such as those involving multiple nodes in databases, caches, or microservices, are inherently prone to failures due to network partitions, node crashes, high latency, or resource exhaustion. Handling failures effectively is essential to maintain reliability, availability, and…

Introduction In distributed systems, ensuring that nodes (e.g., servers, databases, or services) are operational and responsive is critical for maintaining reliability, availability, and fault tolerance. Heartbeats and liveness detection are mechanisms used to monitor the health and operational status of nodes, enabling systems to…

Introduction Generating unique identifiers (IDs) in distributed systems is critical for ensuring data integrity, scalability, and reliability across multiple nodes, such as in databases, caches, or message queues. Unique IDs are used to identify records, transactions, or events (e.g., user…