System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide Volume 2
Authors: Alex Xu & Sahn Lam
Chapter-by-chapter summary covering proximity services, distributed message queues, metrics monitoring, payment systems, digital wallets, stock exchanges, and more large-scale system design problems.
Chapters
- 01 - Proximity Service: 2D geospatial index; quad tree + Geohash
- 02 - Nearby Friends: Redis geohash + pub/sub heartbeat streaming
- 03 - Google Maps: road graph, A*, quad tree, ETA + navigation
- 04 - Distributed Message Queue: Kafka-style, partitions, replicas, consumer groups
- 05 - Metrics Monitoring and Alerting System: time-series DB, query service, alerting pipeline
- 06 - Ad Click Event Aggregation: Kafka + Flink/Spark; 95th-percentile latency SLA
- 07 - Hotel Reservation System: room-type inventory + optimistic locking; 3 TPS
- 08 - Distributed Email Service: user-partitioned metadata DB + LSM search
- 09 - S3-like Object Storage: metadata/data store split; erasure coding
- 10 - Real-time Gaming Leaderboard: Redis sorted sets; fixed sharding by score
- 11 - Payment System: ledger, idempotency, double-entry accounting
- 12 - Digital Wallet: TC/C + event sourcing + Raft; 1M TPS
- 13 - Stock Exchange: sequencer + deterministic matching engine (source truncated)
Reading order
Start with 01–04 for the breadth of patterns (geo, streaming, queues), then the two "consistency heavy" chapters 11–12, then the rest in any order: each chapter is self-contained with its own gist box.