In the fifth episode of the System Design Weekly Podcast, we dive into one of Google’s most influential contributions to distributed storage systems: Bigtable.
Based on Google’s seminal Bigtable white paper, this episode unpacks how Bigtable powers massive-scale applications like Search, Maps, and Gmail—and how it inspired a generation of NoSQL systems like HBase and Cassandra.
We break down Bigtable’s core design, including its data model, SSTables, memtables, and the tablet-based architecture that allows it to scale horizontally across thousands of machines. We also explore how Bigtable achieves consistency and fault tolerance using technologies like the Google File System (GFS) and Chubby.
Whether you're building distributed systems yourself or simply curious about how planet-scale data infrastructure works, this episode will give you a solid foundation in one of the most impactful systems in modern computing.
Tune in to learn how Bigtable balances performance, scalability, and reliability at a truly massive scale.
P.S. AI was used to record this podcast.
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