System Design

Welcome to my System Design learning journey! This section covers scalable architecture patterns, distributed systems, and real-world system design challenges.

What is System Design?

System design is the process of defining the architecture, components, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. It’s about making trade-offs between different aspects like:

• Scalability: How well the system handles growth
• Reliability: How often the system fails
• Availability: How much time the system is operational
• Performance: How fast the system responds
• Maintainability: How easy it is to modify and extend

System Design Interview Process

1. Requirements Gathering

• Functional Requirements: What the system should do
• Non-Functional Requirements: Performance, scalability, availability
• Constraints: Budget, timeline, technology stack

2. Capacity Planning

• Traffic Estimation: Requests per second, data storage needs
• Storage Calculation: Data size, growth rate
• Bandwidth Requirements: Network capacity needed

3. High-Level Design

• System Architecture: Overall structure and components
• Database Design: Data models and storage strategies
• API Design: Interface definitions and protocols

4. Detailed Design

• Component Design: Individual service specifications
• Data Flow: How data moves through the system
• Error Handling: Failure scenarios and recovery

Key Concepts

Scalability

• Horizontal Scaling: Adding more machines
• Vertical Scaling: Adding more resources to existing machines
• Load Balancing: Distributing traffic across multiple servers

Availability

• Redundancy: Multiple copies of critical components
• Failover: Automatic switching to backup systems
• Data Replication: Keeping data synchronized across locations

Consistency

• ACID Properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
• CAP Theorem: Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance
• Eventual Consistency: Data becomes consistent over time

Performance

• Latency: Time to respond to a request
• Throughput: Number of requests handled per unit time
• Caching: Storing frequently accessed data

Common System Design Topics

Web Applications

• Client-Server Architecture
• RESTful APIs
• Microservices
• API Gateway Pattern

Data Storage

• Relational Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL
• NoSQL Databases: MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis
• Data Warehousing: BigQuery, Snowflake
• CDN: Content Delivery Networks

Messaging Systems

• Message Queues: RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Pub/Sub Pattern

Monitoring & Observability

• Logging: Centralized log management
• Metrics: Performance monitoring
• Tracing: Distributed request tracking
• Alerting: Proactive issue detection