An updated and curated list of selected readings to illustrate Scalability, Availability, and Stability Design Patterns in Back-end Development. Concepts are explained in the articles of notable engineers (Werner Vogels, James Hamilton, Jeff Atwood, Martin Fowler, Robert C. Martin, Tom White, Martin Kleppmann) and high quality reference sources (highscalability.com, infoq.com, official engineering blogs, etc). Case studies are taken from battle-tested systems those are serving millions to billions of users (Netflix, Baidu, Flipkart, LINE, Spotify, etc).
> Understand your problems: performance problem (slow for a single user) or scalability problem (fast for a single user but slow under heavy load) by reviewing [design principles](#principles). You can also check some [talks](#talks) of elite engineers from tech giants (Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc) to see how they build and scale their systems.
* [10 Common (Large-Scale) Software Architectural Patterns in a Nutshell](https://towardsdatascience.com/10-common-software-architectural-patterns-in-a-nutshell-a0b47a1e9013)
* [CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed (2012) - Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure at Google](https://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed)
* [The Benefits of Server Side Rendering Over Client Side Rendering](https://medium.com/walmartlabs/the-benefits-of-server-side-rendering-over-client-side-rendering-5d07ff2cefe8)
* [Automate and Abstract: Lessons from Facebook on Engineering for Scale](https://architecht.io/lessons-from-facebook-on-engineering-for-scale-f5716f0afc7a)
* [Organize Monolith Before Breaking it into Services at Weebly](https://medium.com/weebly-engineering/how-to-organize-your-monolith-before-breaking-it-into-services-69cbdb9248b0)
* [Lessons learned running Docker in production at Treehouse](https://medium.com/treehouse-engineering/lessons-learned-running-docker-in-production-5dce99ece770)
* [Mesos, Docker and Ochopod in Localization Services at Autodesk](http://cloudengineering.autodesk.com/blog/2015/11/mesos-docker-and-ochopod-in-autodesk-localization-services.html)
* [Distributed Tracing with Pintrace at Pinterest](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/distributed-tracing-at-pinterest-with-new-open-source-tools-a4f8a5562f6b)
* [Analyzing Distributed Trace Data at Pinterest](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/analyzing-distributed-trace-data-6aae58919949)
* [Distributed Tracing at Uber](https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/)
* [The Log: What Every Software Engineer Should Know](https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying)
* [Using Logs to Build a Solid Data Infrastructure - Martin Kleppmann](https://www.confluent.io/blog/using-logs-to-build-a-solid-data-infrastructure-or-why-dual-writes-are-a-bad-idea/)
* [Scalable and reliable log ingestion at Pinterest](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/scalable-and-reliable-data-ingestion-at-pinterest-b921c2ee8754)
* [Logging Service with Spark at CERN Accelerator](https://databricks.com/blog/2017/12/14/the-architecture-of-the-next-cern-accelerator-logging-service.html)
* [LogDevice: Distributed Data Store for Logs at Facebook](https://code.facebook.com/posts/357056558062811/logdevice-a-distributed-data-store-for-logs/)
* [Exactly-once Semantics are Possible: Here’s How Kafka Does it](https://www.confluent.io/blog/exactly-once-semantics-are-possible-heres-how-apache-kafka-does-it/)
* [Search Service (Half a Trillion Documents and Query Average Latency < 100ms) at Twitter (2014)](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/building-a-complete-tweet-index.html)
* [Manas: High Performing Customized Search System at Pinterest](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/manas-a-high-performing-customized-search-system-cf189f6ca40f)
* [Sherlock: Near Real Time Search Indexing at Flipkart](https://tech.flipkart.com/sherlock-near-real-time-search-indexing-95519783859d)
* [Nebula: Storage Platform to Build Search Backends at Airbnb](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/nebula-as-a-storage-platform-to-build-airbnbs-search-backends-ecc577b05f06)
* [Distributed Version Control](https://betterexplained.com/articles/intro-to-distributed-version-control-illustrated/)
* [Distributed Git Server at Palantir](https://medium.com/@palantir/stemma-distributed-git-server-70afbca0fc29)
* [Git Configuration Files (Dotfiles) Distribution at Booking.com](https://blog.booking.com/dotfiles-distribution-at-booking.com.html)
* [Configuration Management for Distributed Systems (using GitHub and cfg4j) at Flickr](https://code.flickr.net/2016/03/24/configuration-management-for-distributed-systems-using-github-and-cfg4j/)
* [zBase: High Performance, Elastic, Distributed Key-Value Store at Zynga](https://www.zynga.com/blogs/engineering/zbase-high-performance-elastic-distributed-key-value-store-2)
* [Storing Images in Cassandra at Walmart Scale](https://medium.com/walmartlabs/building-object-store-storing-images-in-cassandra-walmart-scale-a6b9c02af593)
* [Scale to serve 100+ million reads/writes using Spark and Cassandra at Dream11](https://medium.com/dream11-tech-blog/leaderboard-dream11-4efc6f93c23e)
* [eBay: Building Mission-Critical Multi-Data Center Applications with MongoDB](https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/ebay-building-mission-critical-multi-data-center-applications-with-mongodb)
* [The AWS and MongoDB Infrastructure of Parse (acquired by Facebook)](https://medium.baqend.com/parse-is-gone-a-few-secrets-about-their-infrastructure-91b3ab2fcf71)
* [JanusGraph: Scalable Graph Database backed by Google, IBM and Hortonworks](https://architecht.io/google-ibm-back-new-open-source-graph-database-project-janusgraph-1d74fb78db6b)
* [Storing Hundreds of Millions of Simple Key-Value Pairs in Redis at Instagram](https://engineering.instagram.com/storing-hundreds-of-millions-of-simple-key-value-pairs-in-redis-1091ae80f74c)
* [Practical NoSQL resilience design pattern for the enterprise (eBay)](https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/blogs/tech/practical-nosql-resilience-design-pattern-for-the-enterprise/)
* [Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data](https://blog.timescale.com/why-sql-beating-nosql-what-this-means-for-future-of-data-time-series-database-348b777b847a)
* [Sharding MySQL at Pinterest](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/sharding-pinterest-how-we-scaled-our-mysql-fleet-3f341e96ca6f)
* [How Airbnb Partitioned Main MySQL Database in Two Weeks](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/how-we-partitioned-airbnb-s-main-database-in-two-weeks-55f7e006ff21)
* [Replication is the Key for Scalability & High Availability](http://basho.com/posts/technical/replication-is-the-key-for-scalability-high-availability/)
* [Scaling MySQL-based financial reporting system at Airbnb](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/tracking-the-money-scaling-financial-reporting-at-airbnb-6d742b80f040)
* [Time Series Data: Why and How to Use a Relational Database instead of NoSQL](https://blog.timescale.com/time-series-data-why-and-how-to-use-a-relational-database-instead-of-nosql-d0cd6975e87c)
* [Beringei: High-performance Time Series Storage Engine at Facebook](https://code.facebook.com/posts/952820474848503/beringei-a-high-performance-time-series-storage-engine/)
* [Atlas: In-memory Dimensional Time Series Database at Netflix](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-atlas-netflixs-primary-telemetry-platform-bd31f4d8ed9a)
* [Heroic: Time Series Database at Spotify](https://labs.spotify.com/2015/11/17/monitoring-at-spotify-introducing-heroic/)
* [Roshi: Distributed Storage System for Time-Series Event at SoundCloud](https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/roshi-a-crdt-system-for-timestamped-events)
* [Building a Scalable Time Series Database on PostgreSQL](https://blog.timescale.com/when-boring-is-awesome-building-a-scalable-time-series-database-on-postgresql-2900ea453ee2)
* [Using CDN to Improve Site Performance at Coursera](https://building.coursera.org/blog/2015/07/09/improving-coursera-global-site-performance-a-head-to-head-cdn-battle-with-production-traffic/)
* [Strategy: Caching 404s Saved 66% On Server Time at The Onion](http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/26/strategy-caching-404s-saved-the-onion-66-on-server-time.html)
* [Introduction to Modern Network Load Balancing and Proxying](https://blog.envoyproxy.io/introduction-to-modern-network-load-balancing-and-proxying-a57f6ff80236)
* [Load Balancing infrastructure to support more than 1.3 billion users at Facebook](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon15europe/program/presentation/shuff)
* [DHCPLB: Open Source Load Balancer for DHCP at Facebook](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1734309626831603/dhcplb-an-open-source-load-balancer/)
* [Load Balancing with Eureka at Netflix](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-shares-cloud-load-balancing-and-failover-tool-eureka-c10647ef95e5)
* [Load Balancing at Yelp](https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2017/05/taking-zero-downtime-load-balancing-even-further.html)
* [Load Balancing at Github](https://githubengineering.com/introducing-glb/)
* [Consistent Hashing to Improve Load Balancing at Vimeo](https://medium.com/vimeo-engineering-blog/improving-load-balancing-with-a-new-consistent-hashing-algorithm-9f1bd75709ed)
* [UDP Load Balancing at 500 pixel](https://developers.500px.com/udp-load-balancing-with-keepalived-167382d7ad08)
* [Concurrency series by Larry Osterman (Principal SDE at Microsoft)](https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Profile/Larry%2bOsterman%2b%5BMSFT%5D/activity)
* [Part 8 – Concurrency for scalability](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/28/concurrency-part-8-concurrency-for-scalability/)
* [Part 9 - APIs that enable scalable programming](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/03/02/concurrency-part-9-apis-that-enable-scalable-programming/)
* [Part 10 - How do you know if you’ve got a scalability issue?](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/03/03/concurrency-part-10-how-do-you-know-if-youve-got-a-scalability-issue/)
* [Mnesia: A Distributed DBMS Rooted in Concurrency](https://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3864331/Mnesia-A-Distributed-DBMS-Rooted-in-Concurrency.htm)
* [Mesia and CAP](https://medium.com/@jlouis666/mnesia-and-cap-d2673a92850)
* [Loop Parallelism Pattern: Extracting parallel tasks from loops](https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2001/cmsc411/projects/unroll/main.htm)
* [Fork/Join Pattern: Good for recursive data processing](http://highscalability.com/learn-how-exploit-multiple-cores-better-performance-and-scalability)
* [Map-Reduce: Born for Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf)
* [On the Death of Map-Reduce - Henry Robinson, Cloudera](http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/the-elephant-was-a-trojan-horse-on-the-death-of-map-reduce-at-google/)
* [Server-side Optimization to Parallelize the Rendering of Web Pages at Yelp](https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2017/07/generating-web-pages-in-parallel-with-pagelets.html)
* [Stream Processing, Event Sourcing, Reactive, CEP, etc and Making sense of it all - Martin Kleppmann](https://www.confluent.io/blog/making-sense-of-stream-processing/)
* [Autoscaling Pub-Sub Consumers at Spotify](https://labs.spotify.com/2017/11/20/autoscaling-pub-sub-consumers/)
* [Pulsar: Pub-Sub Messaging at Scale at Yahoo](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/150078336821/open-sourcing-pulsar-pub-sub-messaging-at-scale)
* [Wormhole: Pub-Sub system at Facebook (2013)](https://code.facebook.com/posts/188966771280871/wormhole-pub-sub-system-moving-data-through-space-and-time/)
* [Kafka in Platform Events Architecture at Salesforce](https://engineering.salesforce.com/how-apache-kafka-inspired-our-platform-events-architecture-2f351fe4cf63)
* [Bullet: Forward-Looking Query Engine for Streaming Data at Yahoo](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/161855616651/open-sourcing-bullet-yahoos-forward-looking)
* [Building Scalable Applications Using Event Sourcing and CQRS with Kafka](https://initiate.andela.com/event-sourcing-and-cqrs-a-look-at-kafka-e0c1b90d17d8)
* [Scaling Gradient Boosted Trees for Click-Through-Rate Prediction at Yelp](https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2018/01/building-a-distributed-ml-pipeline-part1.html)
* [TensorFlowOnSpark: Distributed Deep Learning on Big Data Clusters at Yahoo](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/157196488076/open-sourcing-tensorflowonspark-distributed-deep)
* [CaffeOnSpark: Distributed Deep Learning on Big Data Clusters at Yahoo](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/139916828451/caffeonspark-open-sourced-for-distributed-deep)
* [Image Classification Experiment Using Deep Learning at Mercari](https://medium.com/mercari-engineering/mercaris-image-classification-experiment-using-deep-learning-9b4e994a18ec)
* [Improving Photo Selection With Deep Learning at TripAdvisor](http://engineering.tripadvisor.com/improving-tripadvisor-photo-selection-deep-learning/)
* [Distributed Architecture in Financial Systems](https://medium.com/@sofie_4036/lets-build-a-bank-service-architecture-410dca881291)
* [Building a Modern Bank Backend at Monzo](https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend/)
* [Choosing an Architecture for Core Banking System at TrustBK](https://blog.trustbk.com/choosing-an-architecture-85750e1e5a03)
* [Reinventing the Trading Platform for Scale at Wealthsimple](https://medium.com/@Wealthsimple/engineering-at-wealthsimple-reinventing-our-trading-platform-for-scale-17e332241b6c)
* [Every Day Is Monday in Operations (11 parts) at LinkedIn ](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introduction-every-day-monday-operations-benjamin-purgason)
* [Practical Guide to Monitoring and Alerting with Time Series at Scale](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon17americas/program/presentation/wilkinson)
* [Architectural Patterns for High Availability - Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Architecture at Netflix](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Netflix-Architecture)
* [Always use timeouts (if possible)](https://www.javaworld.com/article/2824163/application-performance/stability-patterns-applied-in-a-restful-architecture.html)
* [Let it crash/Supervisors: Embrace failure as a natural state in the life-cycle of the application](http://erlang.org/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.html)
* [Crash early: An error now is better than a response tomorrow](http://odino.org/better-performance-the-case-for-timeouts/)
* [Bulkheads: Partition and tolerate failure in one part](https://skife.org/architecture/fault-tolerance/2009/12/31/bulkheads.html)
* [Steady state: Always put logs on separate disk](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/policy-based-management/place-data-and-log-files-on-separate-drives)
* [Throttling: Maintain a steady pace](http://www.sosp.org/2001/papers/welsh.pdf)
* [Multi-clustering: Improving Resiliency and Stability of a Large-scale Monolithic API Service at LinkedIn](https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/11/improving-resiliency-and-stability-of-a-large-scale-api)
* [Web Performance: Cache Efficiency Exercise at Facebook](https://code.facebook.com/posts/964122680272229/web-performance-cache-efficiency-exercise/)
* [Improving Performance with Background Data Prefetching at Instagram](https://engineering.instagram.com/improving-performance-with-background-data-prefetching-b191acb39898)
* [Compression Techniques to Solve Network I/O Bottlenecks at eBay](https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/blogs/tech/how-ebays-shopping-cart-used-compression-techniques-to-solve-network-io-bottlenecks/)
* [Optimizing Web Servers for High Throughput and Low Latency at Dropbox](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/09/optimizing-web-servers-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/)
* [Boosting Site Speed Using Brotli Compression at LinkedIn](https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2017/05/boosting-site-speed-using-brotli-compression)
* [Linux Performance Analysis in 60.000 Milliseconds at Netflix](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/linux-performance-analysis-in-60-000-milliseconds-accc10403c55)
* [Improving Video Thumbnails with Deep Neural Nets at YouTube](https://youtube-eng.googleblog.com/2015/10/improving-youtube-video-thumbnails-with_8.html)
* [Optimizing APIs through Dynamic Polyglot Runtime, Fully Asynchronous, and Reactive Programming at Netflix](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/optimizing-the-netflix-api-5c9ac715cf19)
* [Reducing Video Loading Time by Prefetching during Preroll at Dailymotion](http://engineering.dailymotion.com/reducing-video-loading-time-prefetching-video-during-preroll/)
* [30x Performance Improvements on MySQLStreamer at Yelp](https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2018/02/making-30x-performance-improvements-on-yelps-mysqlstreamer.html)
* [Performance Monitoring with Riemann and Clojure at Walmart](https://medium.com/walmartlabs/performance-monitoring-with-riemann-and-clojure-eafc07fcd375)
* [Simone: Distributed Simulation Service at Netflix](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/https-medium-com-netflix-techblog-simone-a-distributed-simulation-service-b2c85131ca1b)
* [Seagull: Distributed System that Helps Running > 20 Million Tests Per Day at Yelp](https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2017/04/how-yelp-runs-millions-of-tests-every-day.html)
* [Scalable Gaming Patterns on AWS (Sep 2017)](https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-scalable-gaming-patterns.pdf)
* [How League Of Legends Scaled Chat To 70 Million Players](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/10/13/how-league-of-legends-scaled-chat-to-70-million-players-it-t.html)
* [Building Real Time Infrastructure at Facebook - Jeff Barber and Shie Erlich, Software Engineer at Facebook](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon17americas/program/presentation/erlich)
* [Building Reliable Social Infrastructure for Google - Marc Alvidrez, Senior Manager at Google](https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/program/presentation/alvidrez)
* [How Google Does Planet-Scale for Planet-Scale Infra - Melissa Binde, SRE Director for Google Cloud Platform](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4vMcD7zKM0)
* [Architecture to Handle 80K RPS Celebrity Sales at Shopify - Simon Eskildsen, Engineering Lead at Shopify](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NWDHgWA28)
* [Scaling Facebook Live Videos to a Billion Users - Sachin Kulkarni, Director of Engineering at Facebook](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO4teCbHvZw)
* [Performance Optimization for the Greater China Region at Salesforce - Jeff Cheng, Enterprise Architect at Salesforce](https://www.salesforce.com/video/1757880/)
* [Beyond the Twelve-Factor App - Exploring the DNA of Highly Scalable, Resilient Cloud Applications (Free)](http://www.oreilly.com/webops-perf/free/beyond-the-twelve-factor-app.csp)
* [Chaos Engineering - Building Confidence in System Behavior through Experiments (Free)](http://www.oreilly.com/webops-perf/free/chaos-engineering.csp?intcmp=il-webops-free-product-na_new_site_chaos_engineering_text_cta)
Copyright Benny (Quoc-Binh) Nguyen, 2018. Licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).