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Distributed Systems System Design Case Studies

16 Distributed Systems case studies from Microsoft with full breakdowns.

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Google Drive
16 min readStorageCDNDistributed Systems
Advanced▶ Mock
Push Notification Service
17 min readReal-timeMessagingDistributed Systems
Advanced+5▶ Mock
Messenger App
9 min readReal-timeMessagingDistributed Systems
Advanced+5▶ Mock
Web Crawler
15 min readDistributed SystemsStorageSearch
Advanced+2▶ Mock
BookMyShow
9 min readDistributed SystemsPaymentsBooking System
Beginner▶ Mock
ChatGPT-Style Conversational AI Service
7 min readAI / MLReal-timeDistributed Systems
Advanced+2▶ Mock
Cloud Console Home Page (Backend-for-Frontend)
4 min readFrontendAPI DesignCaching
Intermediate▶ Mock
Distributed Job Scheduler (Cron at Scale)
7 min readSchedulingDistributed SystemsEvent Driven
Advanced+7▶ Mock
Distributed Key-Value Store (DynamoDB / Cassandra)
7 min readDatabasesDistributed SystemsStorage
Advanced+2▶ Mock
Distributed Rate Limiter
8 min readRate LimitingDistributed SystemsAPI Design
Intermediate+9▶ Mock
Incident Ticket Correlation Platform
3 min readObservabilityData PipelinesDistributed Systems
Advanced▶ Mock
Live Comments for Live Video (Facebook Live / TikTok Live)
6 min readReal-timeMessagingDistributed Systems
Intermediate▶ Mock
Online Chess Platform (chess.com)
6 min readReal-timeDistributed SystemsMessaging
Intermediate▶ Mock
Recommendation System (Candidate Generation + Ranking)
6 min readAI / MLData PipelinesDistributed Systems
Advanced▶ Mock
Secure Multi-Tenant API for an Enterprise AI Copilot
4 min readAI / MLSecurityAPI Design
Advanced▶ Mock
URL Shortener (TinyURL / bit.ly)
7 min readDistributed SystemsCachingStorage
Beginner+4▶ Mock

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Distributed Systems in system design?

Distributed Systems is a core system design topic covered in 90 case studies on InterviewSkool. It appears frequently in FAANG interviews, especially at Google, Amazon, and Meta.

How should I prepare Distributed Systems for system design interviews?

Study the case studies above, focusing on architecture trade-offs, scale estimates, and API designs. Practice explaining your decisions aloud — this is exactly what interviewers evaluate.

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