System Design: Building a Detailed, Scalable RSS/Atom Feed (With Resource Links)
Introduction RSS and Atom feeds remain foundational for syndicating content across the web—from news and blogs to podcasts and enterprise integrations. Designing a robust feed system isn’t just about outputting XML; it’s about correctness, scale, freshness, discoverability, compatibility, and reliability. This article walks through a detailed system design for building and operating RSS/Atom feeds. We’ll cover data modeling, HTTP semantics, caching, pagination and archiving, push (WebSub) vs pull, security, observability, and practical implementation snippets. A comprehensive Resources section at the end provides standards, validators, and production-ready libraries. ...