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Text sharing and code snippets

Pastebin System

System Design Classic

Pastebin is a text-sharing service where users paste content and receive a unique short URL for sharing. Despite its simplicity, it covers fundamental system design concepts: unique key generation, read-heavy traffic patterns (5:1 read/write), content storage strategies (inline for small pastes, object storage for large ones), and TTL-based expiration. Perfect for developers building lightweight text-sharing tools that need fast key-value lookups, auto-expiry, and syntax highlighting.

Data Flow

Load Balancer
Paste API
Paste Handler
Hot Paste Cache
Paste Metadata
Large Paste Storage

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Service Breakdown (6 services)

Other6 services
Load Balancer
  • •Distributes traffic across backend targets
  • •Health-checks services and routes around failures
  • •Scales automatically with traffic spikes
Paste API
  • •Routes API traffic and enforces policies
  • •Manages authentication and rate limiting
  • •Provides a unified API endpoint
Paste Handler
  • •Runs event-driven code without servers
  • •Scales instantly from zero to peak load
  • •Cost-effective for sporadic workloads
Paste Metadata
  • •Handles flexible schema data at scale
  • •Provides low-latency reads and writes
  • •Scales horizontally with partitioning
Large Paste Storage
  • •Stores unstructured data with high durability
  • •Supports lifecycle rules for cost management
  • •Serves as a data lake foundation
Hot Paste Cache
  • •Caches frequently accessed data in-memory
  • •Reduces database round-trips and latency
  • •Supports TTL-based expiration policies

Scaling Strategy

Small pastes (< 256KB) are stored inline in OCI NoSQL Database for fast access. Large pastes go to Object Storage with NoSQL storing the pointer. OCI Cache handles the hot-path for recently created and popular pastes. NoSQL Database TTL automatically cleans up expired pastes without a separate cleanup job. OCI Functions handles both read and write paths with automatic scaling.

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