System design reading list

Curated books and resources on system design, scalability, and reliability.

Books (recommended order)

Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann·Book
Foundational book on data systems, storage, consistency, streams.
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Release It!
Michael T. Nygard·Book
Stability patterns and failure modes for production systems.
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Site Reliability Engineering
Google SRE·Book
Free online edition about reliability, SLIs/SLOs, on-call, incident management.
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The Site Reliability Workbook
Google SRE·Book
Practical patterns for implementing SRE practices.
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Building Microservices
Sam Newman·Book
Designing, deploying, and operating microservice architectures.
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Web Scalability for Startup Engineers
Artur Ejsmont·Book
Practical patterns for scaling web systems in early growth.
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The Art of Scalability
Abbott, Fisher·Book
People, process, and technology patterns for scaling systems and teams.
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Fundamentals of Software Architecture
Mark Richards, Neal Ford·Book
Core architectural patterns and trade-offs.
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System Design Interview (Vol. 1)
Alex Xu·Book
Interview-focused patterns and walkthroughs.
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System Design Interview (Vol. 2)
Alex Xu·Book
Advanced scenarios and case studies for system design interviews.
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Articles & blogs

AWS Architecture Blog
AWS·Article
Reference architectures and patterns on AWS.
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Cloudflare Blog
Cloudflare·Article
Performance, security, and edge network deep dives.
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High Scalability
HighScalability.com·Article
Architecture breakdowns and scalability stories from real systems.
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Netflix Tech Blog
Netflix·Article
Practices around resilience, chaos engineering, and stream processing.
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Uber Engineering Blog
Uber·Article
Real-world posts on microservices, storage, and large-scale infra.
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Practice & guides

Awesome System Design
GitHub curated list·Practice
Curated list of system design resources.
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ByteByteGo Newsletter
Alex Xu·Practice
Weekly design breakdowns and visuals for interviews.
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Grokking the System Design Interview
Educative·Practice
Structured course with common interview patterns.
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System Design Primer
GitHub curated list·Practice
Popular GitHub repo with system design concepts and exercises.
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