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System Design core concepts cheat sheet

Good design​

  • scalability
  • maintainability
  • efficiency
  • reliability

Key elements​

  • moving data
  • storing data
  • transforming data

CAP or Brewer's theorem​

you can only have two of the three at the same time, where can we afford to compromise?

  • consistency
  • availability
  • partition tolerance

Speed​

  • throughput
    • server - RPS
    • database - QPS
    • data - B/s
  • latency
    • how long it takes to handle a single request

API design​

  • defining inputs (product details from a seller)
  • defining outputs (information when user queries for a product)
  • set rate limiter and CORS

Caching​

  • browser
  • server
  • database
  • CDN

Resources​

  • vertical "scale up"
    • single machine/service resources
  • horizontal "scale out"
    • add more machines/instances

Databases​

  • scaling
    • database sharding into smaller chunks
    • data replication
  • performance
    • caching
    • indexing
    • query optimization