System Design Interview Guides

Free, in-depth walkthroughs of the classic interview questions — with the interactive simulations embedded right in the guide. Don't just read about distributed systems. Break them. Fix them. Optimize them.

Easy2 interactive

Design a URL Shortener (TinyURL)

Step-by-step guide to the TinyURL system design interview question: requirements, capacity estimation, base62 encoding, database schema, caching, and the trade-offs interviewers probe. Includes an interactive encoding simulator.

14 min readRead guide
Medium3 interactive

Design WhatsApp (Real-Time Chat)

How to design WhatsApp in a system design interview: WebSocket gateways, message delivery and ordering, offline storage, group fan-out, and end-to-end encryption — with interactive simulations of the hard parts.

16 min readRead guide
Hard2 interactive

Design a Distributed Cache (Redis-like)

Design a Redis-like distributed cache for a system design interview: LRU eviction, consistent hashing, replication, cache stampedes and hot keys — with interactive simulations of eviction and consistent hashing.

15 min readRead guide
Medium2 interactive

Design a Rate Limiter

Step-by-step guide to the rate limiter system design interview question: requirements, capacity estimation, the five limiting algorithms compared (token bucket vs sliding window), distributed rate limiting with Redis + Lua, and fail-open vs fail-closed. Includes an interactive algorithm simulator.

14 min readRead guide
Medium2 interactive

Design Dropbox / Google Drive (File Storage & Sync)

Step-by-step guide to the Dropbox / Google Drive system design interview question: requirements, capacity estimation, chunking and deduplication, delta sync, metadata schema, conflict handling, and blob storage at scale. Includes an interactive chunking demo.

16 min readRead guide
Medium3 interactive

Design YouTube (Video Streaming Service)

Step-by-step guide to the "Design YouTube" system design interview question: requirements, capacity estimation, resumable uploads, the transcoding pipeline, adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH), CDN delivery, and view counting at scale. Includes an interactive ABR simulator.

16 min readRead guide
Easy

Design a Parking Lot System

Step-by-step guide to the parking lot system design interview question: requirements, entity model, concurrent spot allocation across multiple gates without double-assignment, pricing and exit flow, and handling payment outages gracefully.

13 min readRead guide
Easy

Design an Elevator System

Step-by-step guide to the elevator system design interview question: requirements, the car state machine, SCAN/LOOK scheduling versus FCFS, multi-elevator dispatching, starvation avoidance, morning-rush handling, and fault tolerance.

13 min readRead guide

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