How Netflix Actually Works

A deep dive into Netflix's architecture, the 2008 database outage that forced a total rebuild, the Open Connect CDN delivering 98% of traffic from servers inside your own ISP, and the Chaos Engineering practice built on deliberately breaking production.

How Discord Actually Works

A deep dive into Discord's architecture, why one server's crash never touches another thanks to Elixir's Guild Process model, and the eight-year database saga from MongoDB to Cassandra to a custom Rust-powered ScyllaDB setup storing trillions of messages.

How WhatsApp Actually Works

A deep dive into WhatsApp's architecture, the decades-old telecom language behind its massive concurrency, the 'let it crash' philosophy that keeps it running through failures, and how a team of around 50 engineers served hundreds of millions of users.

How Cursor Actually Works

A deep dive into how Cursor IDE blends a familiar code editor with AI from codebase indexing to multi-model routing to how it applies a diff without breaking your file.

How Amazon Actually Works

A deep dive into Amazon's architecture, the internal mandate that forced every team to expose their work through APIs, why your shopping cart has to work even during a hardware failure, and how that same database engineering became AWS's DynamoDB.

How Telegram Actually Works

A deep dive into Telegram's architecture, the cloud-native design that syncs your chats across every device, the custom MTProto protocol built for hostile networks, and the radical team-size philosophy that keeps a billion-user platform running on a team you could fit in one conference room.

Discover How the World's Biggest
Software Platforms Are Built.
Deep dives into the architecture, infrastructure, and engineering decisions behind products like ChatGPT, Netflix, WhatsApp, GitHub, Stripe, Vercel, and more.

Explore Articles GitHub

Software Architecture & System Design

Welcome to InsideTheStack, your premier destination to discover how the world's biggest software platforms are built. Understanding the architecture and system design of massively successful products is the key to leveling up as a software engineer.

Master System Design Interviews

Whether you are preparing for a system design interview, building scalable microservices, or simply curious about the cloud infrastructurechoices made by engineering teams at companies like Netflix, WhatsApp, Stripe, and Vercel, you will find comprehensive deep dives here. We break down complex engineering concepts into digestible, actionable insights.

Demystifying Engineering Tech Stacks

Our mission is to demystify software architecture. We explore the tradeoffs behind different databases, the nuances of distributed systems, and the evolution of tech stacks over time. Dive into our latest articles below to explore how industry-leading platforms tackle unprecedented scale and reliability challenges every single day.

Recent Articles

How Google Search Actually Works

A deep dive into Google Search's architecture: why the web you search is never the live web, the incremental indexing system that cut document freshness delay by 50%, and what the 2024 API leak revealed about Ascorer, NavBoost, and the Twiddler framework that quietly re-ranks every result before you ever see it.

How Zomato Actually Works

A deep dive into Zomato's architecture, why 'your food is 32 minutes away' is a genuinely hard machine learning problem and not a maps calculation, the event-driven backbone moving hundreds of millions of messages a minute, and the database migration story that shows what happens when a system built for one kind of scale meets an entirely different one.

How Shopify Actually Works

A deep dive into Shopify's architecture, why one of the biggest Ruby on Rails codebases on earth chose to stay a monolith instead of splintering into microservices, how 'pods' turned a single database problem into thousands of small, isolated ones, and the scriptable load balancers that keep checkout alive when a million buyers show up in the same sixty seconds.

How Blinkit Actually Works

A deep dive into Blinkit's architecture, why the real innovation isn't faster driving but inventory placed closer to you than ever before, how a monolith's authentication headache led to a proper API gateway, and the real-time systems keeping thousands of dark stores in sync.