High-Level Design (HLD)

Architecture, scalability, data flow, infrastructure choices, and complete distributed-system designs.

Concepts
Examples & Patterns

GitHub Actions

Kafka-backed workflow orchestration, DAG-based job and subtask scheduling, isolated runners, live logs, secrets, retries, and 100K concurrent jobs.

WhatsApp — Chat System

WebSockets, Kafka fan-out, Cassandra message store, offline delivery, presence, and group chat at scale.

Orders App — Swiggy / Uber Eats

Event-driven microservices, order state machine, cart in Redis, real-time tracking, and background job patterns.

Twitter Feed — News Feed

Fan-out on write vs read, celebrity problem, Redis sorted set timelines, Snowflake IDs, and ML ranking.

YouTube — Video Platform

Pre-signed S3 uploads, HLS transcoding pipeline, CDN edge serving, adaptive bitrate, and view count at scale.

Background Jobs

Task queues, Kafka fan-out, DAG workflows, exponential backoff, DLQ, idempotency, and real-world patterns.

Auction System

Race conditions, Kafka partition serialisation, optimistic locking, Redis Lua atomicity, and auction-end edge cases.

Hotel Booking

No double booking via per-night Redis locks + DB CAS, one-row-per-night availability model, geo search with availability counter, and real-time multiplier-based pricing.

Meeting Scheduler

Recurring meetings as one RRULE row instead of infinite occurrences, a single nullable-date attendee table for per-occurrence add/remove and RSVP, and DST-safe expansion.

Notification Service

Fan-out to millions of subscribers, Kafka per-channel topics, APNs/FCM for mobile push, retry with exponential backoff, DLQ, and idempotency via Redis.

Email Notification — Bulk & Urgent

50M emails/day with urgent and bulk priority isolation, transactional outbox, crash recovery, idempotency, retries, DLQ, and multi-provider failover.

Uber

Real-time driver matching with Redis GEORADIUS, 600K GPS writes/sec, geohash spatial indexing, sequential driver offering, and live trip tracking via WebSockets.

Ticketmaster

Distributed seat locking with Redis NX, no double-booking under 10M concurrent users, Elasticsearch search, thundering herd queue, and idempotent bookings.

Live Comments

Real-time fan-out to millions of viewers, Redis channel-per-video, WebSocket delivery, Kafka spike buffering, and hot video scaling.

Saga Pattern

Distributed transactions across microservices — choreography vs orchestration, compensating transactions, and the outbox pattern.

WebSockets

Persistent bidirectional TCP, handshake, scaling with sticky sessions and Redis pub/sub, and 8 common production problems.

Low-Level Design (LLD)

Interview-focused class design, object collaboration, design principles, and practical coding thought process.