Overtime I have came across resources which I have found invaluable for my learning. However, these resources generally get lost in the sea of not so good content.
In this article you will find a curated collection of resources for learning about the architecture of scalable services and databases.
📚 Engineering Blogs from Major Tech Companies
Top Engineering Blogs
- High Scalability – One of the best resources for case studies on scalable architectures
- Netflix Tech Blog Detailed posts about their microservices architecture, chaos engineering, and data platform
- Uber Engineering – Articles on their distributed systems, real-time analytics, and database architectures
- Airbnb Engineering – Posts about their service-oriented architecture and data infrastructure
- LinkedIn Engineering – Insights into Kafka, Samza, and their data infrastructure
- Meta Engineering – Articles on their scale challenges, databases like RocksDB, and infrastructure
- AWS Architecture Center – Whitepapers, reference architectures, and best practices
- Google Cloud Architecture Framework – Design patterns and architecture best practices
🔗 Curated Collections
GitHub Repositories
- Awesome Scalability – Comprehensive collection of scalability patterns and real-world case studies
- System Design Primer – Includes architecture diagrams and explanations of scalable systems
- Awesome System Design – Collection of architecture documents from companies like Nike (DynamoDB), Instagram (Cassandra), and Pinterest (Presto)
Other Collections
- DevOpsSchool’s Collection – Extensive references on patterns for building scalable systems
📄 Academic Papers and Whitepapers
Key Research Resources
- Google Research Publications – Papers on BigTable, MapReduce, Spanner, and more
- Facebook’s TAO Paper – Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph
- ArXiv.org – Search for recent papers on scalable architectures, microservices, and distributed systems
Recent ArXiv Papers
- Building Scalable AI-Powered Applications with Cloud Databases – Architectures and best practices for AI workloads
- Scalable Software as a Service Architecture – SaaS platform architecture with focus on scalability
- Microservices Architecture – Main features of microservices and scalability improvements
- Streaming Data Analysis Architecture – Seven-layered architecture for analyzing streaming data
🏢 Database-Specific Documentation
Popular Scalable Databases
- Cassandra Architecture – Official documentation on Cassandra’s architecture
- MongoDB Architecture Guide – Detailed architecture documentation
- Redis Documentation – Architecture and scaling strategies
- Amazon’s DynamoDB Paper – The original paper on DynamoDB’s architecture
- Apache Kafka Documentation – Distributed streaming platform architecture
📖 Books and Learning Resources
Recommended Books
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann – Excellent resource on distributed systems and database architectures
- Building Microservices by Sam Newman – Architecture patterns for scalable services
- Site Reliability Engineering by Google – How Google runs production systems
🎓 Online Courses and Talks
Video Resources
- InfoQ– Conference talks and presentations on scalable architectures
- System Design Interview – YouTube channel with architecture deep dives
Major Conferences
- Goto
- Strange Loop
- QCon
- AWS re:Invent
- Google I/O
- Facebook @Scale
📝 Additional Resources from Web Search
Blog Posts and Articles
- HackerNoon: Architecting Scalable Databases – Principles of designing scalable databases
- GeeksforGeeks: Building Scalable Databases – Step-by-step guide with real-world examples
- Confluent: Scalable Search Architecture – Building scalable search with Kafka Connect
- Simple Talk: Scalable Database Architectures – Read replicas, caching strategies, and multi-AZ deployments
💡 Pro Tips for Using These Resources
- Start with High Scalability – It aggregates real-world architecture case studies from various companies
- Follow engineering blogs – Subscribe to RSS feeds or newsletters from the companies whose architectures interest you
- Read the original papers – Many scalable systems have academic papers that explain their core concepts in detail
- Look for company insights – Companies often share detailed architecture insights when explaining outages or migrations
- Check GitHub – Many companies open-source parts of their infrastructure with accompanying documentation
🔍 How to Navigate These Resources
For Beginners
- Start with the System Design Primer on GitHub
- Read High Scalability case studies
- Watch System Design Interview videos
For Specific Technologies
- Check the official documentation (Database-Specific section)
- Look for the technology in engineering blogs
- Search ArXiv for recent papers
For Real-World Examples
- Browse the Awesome Scalability GitHub repo
- Read engineering blogs from companies using similar tech stacks
- Look for conference talks on InfoQ
Pulkit Gupta 