System Design / Field Manual Konrad Voss

Interactive field manual

System Design
From Scratch

From vibe coder to architect.

Understand how systems actually work, so you direct the build instead of prompting blind. Built from the one server you've already deployed and grown, decision by decision, to planet scale.

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ONE SERVER PLANET SCALE fail → reroute INTERACTIVE FIELD MANUAL System Design From Scratch From vibe coder to architect. A builder’s path from one server to planet scale. KONRAD VOSS

01

Understand, don't memorize

Architectures are outputs. What transfers is the reasoning that produced them — the forces, the trade-offs, the why.

02

Play, don't just read

The hard-to-feel ideas — load breaking a server, the latency ladder, tail-at-scale — are live instruments here. Operate them.

03

Direct the build

Every chapter ends by turning understanding into leverage: how to brief an AI to build the thing, and how to tell if it got it wrong.

36chapters
39live instruments
6case studies
7parts

What's inside

From the one server you already run to the systems that carry millions of requests a day — the building blocks, the hard parts, the algorithms of scale, and six full case studies.

Part I · Foundations

  1. 01What System Design Actually Is
  2. 02The One-Server App (and Why It Breaks)
  3. 03Thinking in Numbers
  4. 04Latency, Throughput & Speed

Part II · The Building Blocks

  1. 05Load Balancers
  2. 06Databases
  3. 07Caching
  4. 08CDNs
  5. 09Queues & Async
  6. 10Storage & Search

Services & Architecture

  1. M1Monolith, Microservices & Where to Draw the Line
  2. M2APIs & Protocols
  3. M3Discovery, Gateways & the Mesh

Part III · The Hard Parts

  1. 11Replication: Copies Everywhere
  2. 12Partitioning & Sharding
  3. 13Consistency & CAP
  4. 14Transactions, Sagas & Idempotency
  5. 15Failure Is Normal: Resilience
  6. 16Observability

Algorithms of Scale

  1. G1Consistent Hashing
  2. G2Quorums, Consensus & Raft
  3. G3Probabilistic Structures
  4. G4Rate Limiting
  5. G5Gossip, Merkle Trees & CRDTs

Part IV · Putting It Together

  1. 17A Framework for Any Design
  2. 18Case Study: URL Shortener
  3. 19Case Study: Chat System
  4. 20Case Study: News Feed
  5. 21Case Study: Video Streaming
  6. 22Case Study: Ride-Hailing
  7. 23Case Study: Search Autocomplete
  8. 24The Architect's Mindset

Reference & Threads

  1. R1Security at Scale
  2. R2Deployment & DevOps
  3. R3Cost & Capacity Planning
  4. R4Glossary & Numbers
Konrad Voss

A systems architect who has spent the better part of two decades building software that has to stay up — under real traffic, real budgets, and real failure. Everything in this manual was earned in production, not a lecture hall; the field notes throughout come from systems he built and, often enough, watched break.

Start with Chapter 1

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