System Design from Scratch

Chapter 2. Product Goes Viral: System Crashed

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The minimum viable product (MVP) designed in Chapter 1 is bringing in more and more users. People are loving the product and the signups are increasing. We’re at a stage everyone hopes for, the product is popular and viral. But the virality also brings in new bottlenecks. This chapter focuses on figuring out the root cause of these encountered bottlenecks and fixing the existing system design. We’ll start the discussion with system crash debugging, explore ways to fix the issues and improve on the architecture. Along the way, we’ll understand multiple system design concepts such as load balancing and scalability. Let’s dive in.

Debugging System Crash

The users are trying to access their photos feed, but it’s not loading. There are complaints all around that Photoz is down. This is a nightmare for a person managing the systems. Let’s debug the issue and figure out a fix for this problem. Recall the architecture from Chapter 1, the system components ...