The Software Design /System Design Interview Preparation RoadMap (with Resources)

Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.

Hello friends, in last few years, System design interviews have become a crucial part of the hiring process for senior software engineering roles.

These interviews assess your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, testing your knowledge of various Software architecture components and asses your capacity to make high-level design decisions.

Earlier, I have shared system design interview questions like API Gateway vs Load Balancer, Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling, Forward proxy vs reverse proxy., Software design books  and common System design concepts and in this article, I am sharing a complete roadmap to do well on system design interviews

This System Design Interview roadmap will help you prepare for system design interviews, covering essential topics and providing resources for deeper learning.

It includes:

1. Which topics you need to prepare for System design interviews?
2. Detailed sections for each of the 10 main topics in the roadmap
3. Resources for learning more about each topic
4. A conclusion summarizing the key points and offering encouragement

I have tried hard to keep this post informative for beginners and a useful reference for more experienced engineers preparing for interviews.

By the way, if you are preparing for System design interviews and want to learn System Design in-depth then you can also check sites like ByteByteGo, Design Guru, Exponent, Educative, Codemia.io, and Udemy which has many great System design courses, including a System design template which you can use to describe architecture of any distributed system.

---

The Software Design Interview RoadMap

Here is the System Design roadmap I was talking about, we will first see the visual and then we will go on each section to find out what exactly you need to learn and I will also share resources you can use to learn them

1. System Design Fundamentals

Before diving into complex system design, it's crucial to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, here are key fundamental concept every Software engineer should learn:

• Network Protocols: Understand TCP/IP, HTTP, and how they function in distributed systems.
• Operating System Basics: Know about processes, threads, concurrency, and memory management.
• Databases: Familiarize yourself with both relational and non-relational databases.
• Distributed Systems: Learn about concepts like consensus, leader election, and CAP theorem.
• Basic Algorithms: Refresh your knowledge of data structures and algorithms, especially those relevant to distributed systems.

Resources:

• "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann
• Grokking System Design Interview course on DesignGurus.io

---

2. Scalability

Scalability is a critical aspect of system design. Most of the interviewer at FAANG or MAANG company will test your ability to design a scalable system or not. They also like to see whether you have worked in a real world scale system or not.

Here are Key topics related to Scalability which you should prepare for interview:

• Vertical vs. Horizontal Scaling: Understand when to scale up vs. scale out.
• Load Balancing: Learn about various load balancing algorithms and their applications.
• Database Sharding: Understand how to partition data across multiple databases.

Resources:

• "Web Scalability for Startup Engineers" by Artur Ejsmont
• " Scalability & System Design for Developers" on Educative

---

3. Performance

Optimizing system performance is crucial for large-scale applications and its probably the single most important thing for many engineers.

If you are a cricket fan then you may have noticed the interruptions while watching India Pakistan Cricket match on Jio Hotstar due to the sheer number of people watching at the same time. You have to design system which can withstand such traffic and still be smooth.

Here are key topics you should prepare:

• Caching: Understand different caching strategies, including CDNs and in-memory caches like Redis.
• Database Indexing: Learn how to properly index databases for faster queries.
• Asynchronous Processing: Understand how to use message queues and event-driven architectures.
• Optimizations: Learn about various optimization techniques for databases, application code, and network requests.

Resources:

• "Grokking Modern System Design for Software Engineers & Managers" by Educative
• "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" by Brendan Gregg

Both these books and course are excellent resource to learn about various techniques and tools about performance optimization and in general writing high performance apps.

---

4. Reliability

In real world, particularly in domains like Finance, Healthcare, and any mission critical domain, ensuring system reliability is crucial for production systems.

In fact, reliability is so important that it can completely break your company if people found that your systems are not reliable enough. I mean who want to put their money on a bank where their money can be lost due to any data failure.

Here are topics related to reliability you should prepare for interviews:

• Fault Tolerance: Learn how to design systems that can withstand component failures.
• High Availability: Understand concepts like redundancy and failover mechanisms.
• Disaster Recovery: Learn about backup strategies and recovery procedures.
• Data Replication: Understand different replication strategies and their trade-offs.

Resources:

• "Site Reliability Engineering" by Google
• "Distributed Systems for Practitioners" by Brendan Burns

---

5. Storage

While storage have become affordable over the period of time, its not always the hard disk where you store your data. Choosing the right storage solution is critical for system design. It can affect many things from performance, scalability to reliability.

Here are storage related topics you should prepare:

• SQL vs. NoSQL: Understand the use cases for different types of databases.
• Object Storage: Learn about systems like Amazon S3 and their use cases.
• File Systems: Understand distributed file systems like HDFS.
• Data Warehousing: Learn about big data storage and processing systems.

Resources:

• "NoSQL Distilled" by Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler
• "Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview" by DesignGuru

---

6. Microservices

Microservices architecture has become increasingly popular in large-scale systems and its also one of the favorite topic for many interviewers. Even if you have not worked in Microservices you should be familiar with its pros and cons and various Microservice design patterns like API Gateway, Saga, CQRS etc to do well on interviews.

Here are topics you should special attention:

• Service-Oriented Architecture: Understand the principles of SOA and microservices.
• API Gateway: Learn about the role of API gateways in microservices architectures.
• Service Discovery: Understand how services locate and communicate with each other.

Resources:

• "Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems" by Sam Newman 2nd Edition

• "Grokking Microservices Design Patterns" by Chris Richardson

---

7. Security

Security is paramount in system design, even more so in the age of increasing Cyber crimes and attacks. You not just need to protect your assets but also need to ensure that only the right people can access it.

Here are security related topics you should prepare for System design interviews:

• Authentication: Understand different authentication mechanisms (e.g., OAuth, JWT).
• Authorization: Learn about role-based access control and other authorization strategies.
• Encryption: Understand the basics of encryption and when to use it.
• HTTPS: Know how HTTPS works and why it's important.
• Firewalls: Understand the role of firewalls in system security.

Resources:

• "Grokking Web Application Security"
• "Application Security --- The Complete Guide" by Derek Fisher

---

8. Monitoring

Effective monitoring is crucial for maintaining and troubleshooting large-scale systems and its no brainier. Anything you cannot measure you cannot improve, hence whether its performance or stability, you need monitoring to improve them. Monitoring is also important from support perspective and troubleshooting.

Here are Monitoring related topics you should prepare for System design:

• Logging: Understand best practices for application and system logging.
• Metrics: Learn about key performance indicators and how to measure them.
• Alerting: Understand how to set up effective alerting systems.
• Distributed Tracing: Learn how to trace requests across multiple services.
• Health Checks: Understand how to implement and use health checks in your system.

Resources:

• "The Art of Monitoring" by James Turnbull
• "Prometheus | The Complete Hands-On for Monitoring & Alerting" on Udemy

---

9. Cloud Services

Understanding cloud services is increasingly important in system design as most of the new software development is happening on Cloud. Also cloud and Microservices and distributed system goes hand-in-hand.

Here are the key cloud concepts you should be aware of:

• IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS: Understand the different levels of cloud services.
• Serverless: Learn about serverless architectures and their use cases.
• Containers: Understand containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes.

Resources:

• "Cloud Native Patterns" by Cornelia Davis
• "Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners --- Hands-on" on Udemy

---

10. System Design Patterns

As an experienced developers you should also familiarize yourself with common system design patterns. These will not just help you to participate in conversation with interviewer but also to explain and articulate your answer better.

Here are the key System Design patterns you should be aware of:

• Pub/Sub: Understand the publish-subscribe pattern for event-driven systems.
• CQRS: Learn about Command Query Responsibility Segregation.
• Event Sourcing: Understand how to store system state as a sequence of events.
• Circuit Breaker: Learn how to prevent cascading failures in distributed systems.
• Bulkhead: Understand how to isolate components to prevent system-wide failures.
• Saga: Learn how to manage data consistency across microservices.

Resources:

• "Enterprise Integration Patterns" by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf
• "Microservices Architecture" by Educative
• "Grokking Microservices Design Patterns" by Chris Richardson

---

Conclusion

Mastering system design is a journey that requires both breadth and depth of knowledge. This roadmap provides a structured approach to preparing for system design interviews, covering the essential topics that often come up.

Remember that system design is as much about trade-offs and decision-making as it is about technical knowledge. Practice explaining your thought process and justifying your design choices.

As you prepare, work on designing real-world systems, discuss your designs with peers, and stay updated with the latest trends in distributed systems.

With dedication and practice, you'll be well-equipped to tackle even the most challenging system design interviews.

Bonus

Also, here is the bonus for you, a free book. I just found a new free book to learn Distributed System Design, you can also read it here on Microsoft --- https://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/EN-CNTNT-eBook-DesigningDistributedSystems.pdf

image_credit --- twitter

Comments

[Robin ch]

Amazing post!! Really helpful 👍

[Soma]

thanks

[Dkos]

Great roadmap! It covers all key aspects of system design interviews, from fundamentals to cloud services. Adding real-world case studies, hands-on practice, and emerging trends (like AI-driven scaling) could make it even stronger. A fantastic resource for both beginners and experienced engineers!