Welcome to Interactive System Design! 🚗

This tutorial uses a simple ride-hailing service to teach you how systems handle traffic. You’ll learn about throughput, latency, queues, and backpressure through hands-on experiments.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to:

• ✅ Explain the difference between requests, throughput, latency, and concurrency
• ✅ Identify bottlenecks as load increases
• ✅ Understand why queues exist and when they help
• ✅ Apply backpressure and load shedding concepts
• ✅ Evaluate scaling strategies and their limits

Tutorial Structure

This tutorial is divided into 7 interactive pages (approximately 30 minutes):

1. Tutorial Intro (3 min) - Set the scene and define the toy system
2. Model the Basic System (5 min) - Understand synchronous request handling
3. Add Load and Show Bottlenecks (6 min) - See what happens under pressure
4. Introduce a Message Queue (6 min) - Learn how queues smooth traffic spikes
5. Backpressure and Load Shedding (5 min) - Prevent system overload
6. Scaling Patterns and Limits (5 min) - Vertical vs horizontal scaling
7. Wrap-up and Checklist (3 min) - Practical takeaways

Interactive Features

Throughout this tutorial, you’ll experience:

• 🎚️ Interactive Sliders - Adjust traffic and see real-time effects
• 📊 Queue Visualizers - Watch requests queue up and process
• 🎬 Animated Timelines - See how requests flow through the system
• 📈 Live Metrics - Watch latency and throughput change
• 🔄 Architecture Toggles - Switch between different system designs

Prerequisites

Before starting, you should have:

• Basic understanding of REST APIs
• Familiarity with databases and web services
• Some experience with backend development

Don’t worry if you’re not an expert - we’ll explain concepts as we go!

Estimated Time

⏱️ 30 minutes to complete all 7 pages

You can take breaks between pages and resume anytime. Your progress will be tracked as you navigate through the tutorial.

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The Problem We’re Solving

Quick Preview: We run a tiny ride-hailing service. Users tap a button to request a ride. Our dispatcher service finds a driver and confirms the ride.

What matters:

• Users want fast confirmation
• The business wants to handle traffic spikes without the system falling over

What you’ll learn:

• How to think about capacity and load
• When queues help and when they hurt
• How to prevent systems from crashing under pressure
• Simple scaling strategies and their limits

Ready to start? Click the button above to begin your system design journey!