I know there are a number of articles on this subject. My goal in writing this article is to get them all into a single article that covers the majority of things. This article is based on my personal experience and my learnings from other blogs.
So, here are the points which you could practice to become an expert in system design, if these points help you to understand system design I will be really very glad.
- If we are dealing with a read-heavy system, it's good to consider using a Cache
- If we need low latency in system, it's good to consider using a Cache & CDN
- If we are dealing with a write-heavy system, it's good to consider using a Message Queue for Async processing
- If we need a system to be ACID complaint, we should go for RDBMS or SQL Database
- If data is unstructured & doesn't require ACID properties, we should go for NOSQL Database
- If the system has complex data in the form of videos, images, files, etc, we should go for Blob/Object storage
- If the system requires complex precomputation like a news feed, we should consider using a Message Queue & Cache
- If the system requires searching data in high volume, we should consider using a search index, tries, or search engine like Elastic search
- If the system requires to Scale SQL Database, we should consider using Database Sharding
- If the system requires High Availability, Performance, and Throughput, we should consider using a Load Balancer
- If the system requires faster data delivery globally, reliability, high availability, and performance, we should consider using a CDN
- If the system has data with nodes, edges, and relationships like friend lists, and road connections, we should consider using a Graph Database
- If the system needs scaling of various components like servers, databases, etc, we should consider using Horizontal Scaling
- If the system requires high performing database queries, we should consider using Database Indexes
- If the system requires bulk job processing, we should consider using Batch Processing & Message Queues
- If the system requires reducing server load and preventing DOS attacks, we should consider using a Rate Limiter
- If the system has microservices, we should consider using an API Gateway (Authentication, SSL Termination, Routing, etc)
- If the system has a single point of failure, we should implement Redundancy in that component
- If the system needs to be fault-tolerant, and durable, we should implement Data Replication (creating multiple copies of data on different servers)
- If the system needs user-to-user communication (bi-directional) in a fast way, we should consider using Websockets
- If the system needs the ability to detect failures in a distributed system, we should consider implementing Heartbeat
- If the system needs to ensure data integrity, we should consider implementing Checksum Algorithm
- If the system needs to transfer data between various servers in a decentralized way, we should go for Gossip Protocol
- If the system needs to scale servers with add/removal of nodes efficiently, no hotspots, we should implement Consistent Hashing
- If the system needs anything to deal with a location like maps, nearby resources, we should consider using Quadtree, Geohash, etc.
Thanks for reading. I hope, you enjoyed my content and I would be happy to hear your valuable feedback/comments.