System Design

The process of defining a system’s architecture, components, and interfaces to meet functional and non-functional requirements.

Key Aspects * Scalability * Performance * Reliability * Maintainability * Cost-effectiveness

General Software Engineering Principle Overview

High Level Design (HLD) - Architecture & Strategy

• System Architecture - APIs, Databases, Caching, Load Balancing
• Technology Choices - SQL vs NoSQL, Monolith vs Microservices
• Data Flows - Request Handling, processing, storage flows
• Scalability & Fault Tolerance - Replication, Sharding, Failover
• Trade-offs & Bottlenecks - CAP Theorem, latency, cost

Low-Level Design (LLD) - Implementation & Code

• Class Diagrams - Object-oriented structure
• Database Schema - Tables, indexing, query optimization
• API Design - REST, GraphQL, gRPC best practices
• Design Patterns - Singleton, Factory, CQRS, Event-Driven
• Problem Implementations - Examples & Case Studies

Further Reading

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications – Martin Kleppmann
• System Design Interview Guide – Alex Xu
• The Art of Scalability – Abbott & Fisher
• Company Engineering Blogs/Content