Awesome Scalability

What is in it

The README is one long, structured index. The main sections are:

• Principle: foundational essays and papers on distributed systems and scale
• Scalability: microservices, distributed caching, queues, databases, sharding, replication, consensus and more, each with links to company write-ups
• Availability: failover, load balancing, rate limiting, disaster recovery and chaos engineering
• Stability: circuit breakers, timeouts, crash-only design and similar patterns
• Performance: profiling, tuning and latency work at real companies
• Intelligence: machine learning and data platforms in production
• Architecture: named company architectures and how they evolved
• Interview and Organization: material on design interviews and on building and running engineering teams
• Talks and Books

The introduction suggests entry points by situation: if your system goes slow, if it goes down, if you have a design interview, or if you are building a team.

The numbers

As of September 2026 the repository has about 74k GitHub stars and 7.1k forks, and is MIT licensed. The last commit was in January 2026, so it is maintained but not updated often. Some older links will have moved or died, which is normal for a list of this age.

How to use it well

Do not read it top to bottom. It is a finding aid, not a course.

• Come with a question. For example: how do companies implement rate limiting? Jump to that heading, open two or three posts from different companies, and compare their choices.
• Prefer write-ups by the builders. A post by the team that ran a migration beats an article about it.
• Take notes per concept, not per link. After three posts on distributed caching, write down what they had in common and where they differed.
• Combine it with a structured resource. Use a book or course for the order of topics and this list for depth on each.

Who it is for

Mid-level engineers who already know the vocabulary and want real examples, people preparing for design discussions who want to cite how a real system handled something, and tech leads looking for material on reliability practices. Beginners will find it overwhelming; start with a fundamentals course and use this later.

Common questions

Is it free? Yes, the list is free and nearly everything it links to is free to read.

How is it different from the System Design Primer? The Primer teaches concepts and walks through designs. This list mostly points outward to primary sources. They complement each other.

Are the links current? Most are, but some date back many years. Old posts are often still valuable; just check whether the company's approach has since changed.

Best for: engineers who want primary-source reading on scalability, reliability and performance, organised by topic.