System Design for DevOps · Module 06

Design a System: Three Worked Cases

Put everything together with one repeatable method — requirements, estimates, API, data model, architecture, bottlenecks — applied to a URL shortener, a photo upload site and a video streaming site.

Practice interactively →

What you will learn

• Apply a repeatable six-step method to an open design question
• Design a read-heavy key-value service with caching and unique ID generation
• Design direct-to-storage uploads with asynchronous processing and a CDN
• Design video ingest, transcoding to adaptive bitrates and edge delivery

Lessons

1. Design a URL Shortener

   A URL shortener maps short codes to long URLs: a write path that generates unique codes, and a very read-heavy redirect path served from cache, with a key-value store and analytics off the hot path.

2. Design a Photo Upload Website

   Photos are uploaded straight to object storage with pre-signed URLs, processed asynchronously into thumbnails, served through a CDN, and described by metadata in a database; the web tier never carries image bytes.

3. Design a Video Streaming Website

   A video site ingests large uploads, transcodes them into several resolutions and short segments for adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH), and delivers segments from CDNs; metadata, search and view counts run on separate paths.