Large-Scale Infrastructure

The systems underneath the systems: unique ID generation, distributed object storage, event streaming, and a federated social protocol — the plumbing the internet runs on.

After this path you will be able to

Reason about infrastructure-level trade-offs: ID generation at microsecond precision, erasure coding vs replication for durability, partition leadership failover, and the CAP implications of a federated architecture.

Interview approach for this path

1.Start with the durability and availability requirements before anything else. For infrastructure, losing data is worse than downtime.
2.Explain your ID generation strategy: if you need globally unique IDs at scale, say Snowflake-style IDs and explain the bit layout (timestamp, machine id, sequence).
3.For storage at scale, distinguish replication (copies for availability) from sharding (partitions for capacity). Address both.
4.Discuss leader election explicitly: who owns a partition, how does failover happen, and how long is the downtime window?
5.Address CAP trade-offs for each component. A broker like Kafka is CP for partition leadership, but AP for read replicas. Be precise.
6.Talk about operational concerns: how do you add capacity without downtime, how do you rebalance partitions, and how do you handle a slow follower?

Systems in this path

4 total

Concepts reinforced throughout

Replication Sharding / Data Partitioning Consistent Hashing Leader Election CAP Theorem

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Big Tech Systems Explained

The architectures behind Netflix, TikTok, Airbnb, and the stock exchange — each one a masterclass in a different hard problem at scale.

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