System Design: What is system design?

Before we start this course, let's talk about what even is system design.

System design is the process of defining the architecture, interfaces, and data
for a system that satisfies specific requirements. System design meets the needs
of your business or organization through coherent and efficient systems. It requires
a systematic approach to building and engineering systems. A good system design requires
us to think about everything, from infrastructure all the way down to the data and how it's stored.

Why is System Design so important?

System design helps us define a solution that meets the business requirements. It is
one of the earliest decisions we can make when building a system. Often it is essential
to think from a high level as these decisions are very difficult to correct later. It
also makes it easier to reason about and manage architectural changes as the system evolves.

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This article is part of my open source System Design Course available on Github.

karanpratapsingh / system-design

Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews

System Design

Hey, welcome to the course. I hope this course provides a great learning experience.

This course is also available on my website and as an ebook on leanpub. Please leave a ⭐ as motivation if this was helpful!

Table of contents

• Getting Started

  • What is system design?

• Chapter I

  • IP
  • OSI Model
  • TCP and UDP
  • Domain Name System (DNS)
  • Load Balancing
  • Clustering
  • Caching
  • Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Proxy
  • Availability
  • Scalability
  • Storage

• Chapter II

  • Databases and DBMS
  • SQL databases
  • NoSQL databases
  • SQL vs NoSQL databases
  • Database Replication
  • Indexes
  • Normalization and Denormalization
  • ACID and BASE consistency models
  • CAP theorem
  • PACELC Theorem
  • Transactions
  • Distributed Transactions
  • Sharding
  • Consistent Hashing
  • Database Federation

• Chapter III

  • N-tier architecture
  • Message Brokers
  • Message Queues
  • Publish-Subscribe
  • Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
  • Monoliths and Microservices
  • Event-Driven Architecture (EDA)
  • Event Sourcing
  • Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
  • API Gateway
  • REST, GraphQL, gRPC
  • Long polling, WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE)

• Chapter IV

  • …

View on GitHub

Comments

[Steve Mathews]

Great article on system design! Understanding system design is crucial for building scalable and efficient applications.
For those interested in diving deeper into design systems, I recommend checking out this comprehensive UI/UX handbook on design systems. It covers everything from the fundamentals to advanced concepts, providing valuable insights for designers and developers alike. Happy designing!