Big Tech & FAANG Architecture Blueprints
Explore how Netflix, Google, Meta, Uber, Stripe, Amazon, Discord, and 170+ engineering organizations design distributed systems handling billions of requests per second. Every case study links directly to first-principles curriculum topics, trade-offs, and primary technical papers.
Netflix
Streaming & MicroservicesGlobal Video Streaming & Fault-Tolerant Microservices
How Netflix delivers 15% of all global downstream internet traffic across Open Connect CDN appliances, Zuul API edge routing, and Chaos Engineering resiliency.
- Open Connect CDN & BGP Anycast Routing
- Zuul 2 Asynchronous Edge Routing & Chaos Resiliency
Globally Distributed Transactions, TrueTime & Cluster Orchestration
The foundational systems that invented modern distributed computing: Spanner globally synchronous transactions with TrueTime atomic clocks, Borg cluster orchestration, and Maglev consistent network load balancing.
- Spanner: TrueTime & External Consistency
- Maglev: Network Load Balancer
Meta / Facebook
Social Graph & In-Memory CacheTAO Graph Store, RocksDB Storage & WhatsApp Erlang Clusters
Architectures powering 3+ billion monthly users: TAO distributed social graph cache, RocksDB embedded log-structured storage, and WhatsApp’s 2.8M concurrent Erlang connection servers.
- TAO: Distributed Social Graph Cache
- WhatsApp: 2.8M TCP Connections on Erlang/FreeBSD
Amazon / AWS
Cloud, E-Commerce & Storage EnginesDynamo Consistent Hashing, SQS Decoupling & Aurora Storage
The foundational cloud architecture patterns that gave birth to NoSQL: Amazon Dynamo paper consistent hashing rings, Aurora distributed log storage, and S3 strong consistency.
- Dynamo: Consistent Hashing & Sloppy Quorums
- AWS Aurora: The Log is the Database
Uber
High-Concurrency Geospatial MobilityH3 Hexagonal Geospatial Indexing & Real-Time DISCO Dispatch
Real-time mobility matching at planet scale: H3 hexagonal hierarchical geospatial index, DISCO supply-demand marketplace matching, and Cadence durable workflow orchestration.
- H3: Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index
Stripe
Fintech & Transaction LedgersStrict API Idempotency & Immutable Double-Entry Ledgers
The engineering standard for high-reliability financial transactions: idempotent API state machines, immutable double-entry accounting ledgers, and PCI-DSS zero-trust vaults.
- Idempotency Keys & Distributed State Machine
Discord
Real-Time Chat & VoIPTrillions of Messages on ScyllaDB & Elixir WebSockets
Scaling real-time communications to billions of daily messages: Elixir process multiplexing, migrating from Cassandra to ScyllaDB C++, and WebRTC audio mesh routing.
- Cassandra to ScyllaDB: C++ & Seastar Framework
Cloudflare
Global Edge & SecurityBGP Anycast, eBPF DDoS Mitigation & Pingora Rust Proxy
Protecting and accelerating 20%+ of the global web: BGP Anycast routing, eBPF & XDP Layer-4 line-rate DDoS absorption, and Pingora Rust proxying.
- BGP Anycast & eBPF XDP DDoS Filtering
Spotify
Audio Streaming & Vector SearchSub-200ms Audio Latency & Annoy Vector Search
Instant audio playback and recommendation systems: chunked Vorbis/AAC audio streaming, Annoy approximate nearest neighbor vector search, and event-driven data infrastructure.
- Sub-200ms Audio Playback Architecture
GitHub
Developer Systems & Sharded MySQLSpokes 3-Way Git Replication & Freno MySQL Throttling
The infrastructure behind 100M+ developers: Spokes three-way Git repository replication, Vitess horizontal database sharding, and Freno cooperative MySQL replica throttling.
- Spokes: 3-Way Fault-Tolerant Git Replication
Airbnb
Multi-Sided Marketplace & Data PipelinesStrangler Fig Monorail Migration & Zipline ML Feature Store
Scaling marketplace search and dynamic pricing: Monorail migration using Debezium CDC and Strangler Fig, calendar lock concurrency, and Zipline offline-to-online ML feature stores.
- Strangler Fig Monorail Migration with CDC
Zerodha
High-Throughput Financial ExchangeLMAX Disruptor Lock-Free Ring Buffers & Binary WebSockets
How India’s largest stock broker processes billions in daily trades with minimalist, high-performance Go and Python infrastructure: LMAX Disruptor patterns and packed binary WebSockets.
- Lock-Free Disruptor Ring Buffers for Market Ticks
GitHub
Developer Tools & Distributed GitDistributed Git Storage, Spokes Replication & Monolith Scalability
How GitHub serves 100M+ developers, petabytes of Git repositories, and billions of daily API requests across Spokes file-server clusters, partition-safe MySQL, and resilient Redis background queues.
- Spokes Application-Level File System Replication
Twitter / X
Social Feeds & Realtime FanoutHigh-Fanout Timelines, Snowflake IDs & Distributed Key-Value Stores
How Twitter/X routes half a billion daily tweets to 300M+ active users using hybrid push/pull fanout timelines, Snowflake 64-bit unique IDs, and Manhattan key-value clusters.
- Hybrid Push vs Pull Fanout Topology
Apple
Cloud Storage & Mobile SyncCloudKit Delta Sync, FoundationDB & Apple Push Notification (APNs)
How Apple powers cross-device synchronization for 2 billion active iOS and macOS devices using CloudKit change tokens, FoundationDB transactional metadata, and persistent APNs socket connections.
- Server-Assisted Delta Synchronization with Change Tokens
Dropbox
Distributed File Systems & Block StorageMagic Pocket Custom Hardware & Content-Addressable Chunk Storage
How Dropbox stores exabytes of user files by splitting files into 4MB immutable chunks, deduplicating them globally via SHA-256 hashes, and persisting them across custom Magic Pocket storage engines.
- Content-Addressable 4MB Chunking & Global Deduplication
Apache Kafka Origination, Espresso NoSQL & Distributed Social Graph
How LinkedIn invented Apache Kafka to handle trillions of daily metrics, built Espresso for distributed document storage, and queries 1B+ professional relationships.
- Distributed Change Data Capture (Databus to Kafka)
Datadog
Observability & High-Cardinality TelemetryRealtime Distributed Tracing, High-Cardinality Metrics & APM Ingestion
How Datadog ingests tens of trillions of events daily across millions of client agents, aggregating high-cardinality metrics in memory and persisting logs in partitioned columnar stores.
- Edge Metric Aggregation & Adaptive Tail Sampling
Bipartite Graph Sharding, PinJoin Realtime Feeds & Zen Graph Storage
How Pinterest models hundreds of billions of user pins and boards across Zen graph clusters, executing low-latency bipartite graph traversals for personalized image discovery.
- Bipartite Graph Partitioning by Board ID
Redis
In-Memory Datastores & CachingSingle-Threaded Event Loop Physics, Redis Cluster & Sentinel High Availability
How Redis delivers sub-millisecond latencies across millions of operations per second using epoll non-blocking I/O multiplexing, 16,384 hash slots, and Sentinel quorum failover.
- Single-Threaded Event Loop & CPU Cache Locality
Kubernetes
Cloud Infrastructure & Container OrchestrationDeclarative State Reconciliation, Raft etcd Storage & Kubelet Node Control
How Kubernetes orchestrates millions of distributed application containers across bare-metal and cloud fleets using declarative desired-state loops and Raft consensus.
- Declarative Reconciliation Loop (Edge-Triggered with Level-Driven Fallback)
20 Real-World Production Architecture Deep Dives
Topics 256 to 275 deconstruct the exact implementation details of Netflix Zuul & Open Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, Uber DOMA, WhatsApp Erlang, Instagram Postgres Sharding, Meta TAO, and Zerodha Disruptor ring buffers.