System Design Masterclass: Vol 2 - Building Inventory Systems That Survive the Crush
System Design Masterclass: Vol 2 - Building Inventory Systems That Survive the Crush
When 10 million users hit your site in one second, standard architecture melts.
Volume 1 taught you how to build financial systems that never lose money (Correctness). Volume 2 teaches you how to build inventory systems that never crash (Concurrency).
This book is dedicated to the "Thundering Herd"—the specific physics of Flash Sales, Ticket Launches, and High-Frequency Trading.
Most engineers try to solve these problems by "adding more servers." But when 50,000 people try to buy the exact same seat at a Taylor Swift concert, adding servers doesn't help—it makes the database lock contention worse.
System Design Masterclass: Volume 2 takes you into the war room.
Using the same "Simulation" format as Volume 1, we deconstruct the architectures used by giants like Ticketmaster, Shopify, and Amazon to survive the crush.
What you will learn in Volume 2:
-
The Concurrency Layer: Why Optimistic Locking fails at scale, and how to use Pessimistic Locking (
SELECT FOR UPDATE NOWAIT) to handle massive contention. - The Inventory Engine: How to bypass the slow database entirely using Redis Atomic Counters and Lua Scripts for 100k+ TPS.
- The Traffic Control: How to implement Virtual Waiting Rooms at the CDN edge to shed load before it ever hits your backend.
- The Defense: How to block sophisticated scalper bots using Proof-of-Work (PoW), Device Fingerprinting, and Post-Purchase Audits.
- The Global Scale: How to handle multi-region inventory using Geofencing and Async Rebalancing (PACELC Theorem).
Who is this for?
- Senior Engineers designing high-traffic e-commerce or booking platforms.
- Candidates preparing for the "Design Ticketmaster" interview question.
- Tech Leads dealing with race conditions and "sold out" anomalies.
What you get:
- 8 Deep-Dive Simulations: From basic locking to global replication.
- 200+ Pages of no-fluff architectural strategy.
- Sequence Diagrams & Code Snippets (SQL, Redis Lua, C#) for every pattern.
Don't fear the traffic spike. Engineer for it.
System Design Masterclass: Vol 2 is the definitive guide to architecting for extreme concurrency. While Volume 1 focused on financial correctness, this volume tackles the chaos of Flash Sales and Ticket Launches. Through 7 battle-hardened "Interview Simulations," you will learn why standard scaling fails when 10 million users compete for limited inventory. You will master Pessimistic Locking, Redis Atomic Counters, Virtual Waiting Rooms, and Bot Protection. Designed for Senior and Staff engineers, this book bridges the gap between theoretical "horizontal scaling" and the real-world physics of handling the crush. Build systems that survive the spike.