System Design on AWS

Chapter 16. Designing a Social Network and Newsfeed System

Social network websites like Twitter (now X), Instagram, and LinkedIn have become vital parts of people’s lives, with most users utilizing them to share information with other people. This information, often referred to as a post on each platform, can be shared as text, images, videos, emojis, and more.

Social networking websites offer a variety of features, and we’ll specifically dig deeper into the design of the newsfeed (or user timeline—we’ll use both these terms interchangeably) component of the system. Newsfeed refers to the stream of posts and updates published by other users that a user typically sees as soon as they log into a social media app. Users can interact with these posts via emoji or text responses, or even by sharing the posts on their own feed. The newsfeed for each website can be derived based on different factors. We’ll start our discussion with the system requirements and then proceed to identifying system components to support these requirements. We’ll end the chapter with the potential architecture for our social network newsfeed system on the AWS cloud.

System Requirements

Social networking websites offer a variety of features, such as posts that are shared (text, images, videos), a built-in chat messenger, user stories that typically expire in 24 hours, and more. Each feature can be an independent system—for example, the chat messenger, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 19. For now, let’s dig ...