Designing a Service Like Twitter

In today’s digital landscape, social media platforms have revolutionized communication and information sharing. Twitter, currently know as X, is a microblogging service allowing users to share short messages called tweets, has emerged as a global phenomenon with millions of active users and billions of tweets generated daily. Designing a service like Twitter presents unique challenges in scalability, reliability, and user experience.

This chapter explores the system design of a Twitter-like service, applying our learnings from basic system design blocks to create a scalable and efficient platform. We will examine the core features, non-functional requirements, data models, and scale calculations that form the foundation of the system. Based on these, we’ll propose a high-level design architecture leveraging various components, such as load balancers, API gateways, caches, databases, and storage systems. We’ll also delve into...