System Design

System Design is the art of building scalable, reliable, and maintainable software architectures. It's the move from "Writing Code" to "Designing Ecosystems."

In this section, we cover the core concepts used to build massive distributed systems like Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube.

The Core Pillars

Every massive system is built on these foundational concepts:

Scalability & Availability

• Scalability
• Latency vs Throughput
• CAP Theorem
• Consistency Models
• Availability & Fault Tolerance
• Fault Tolerance
• Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
• Load Balancing

Storage & Data Distribution

• Blob Storage
• Distributed File Systems
• Data Partitioning & Sharding
• Denormalization

Architectural Patterns

• Monolith vs Microservices
• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Pub/Sub Systems
• Message Queues
• API Gateway
• Streaming

Distributed Coordination & Resiliency

• Idempotency
• Rate Limiting
• Distributed Locking
• Leader Election & Heartbeats
• Consensus Algorithms
• Handling Failures
• Auto-Scaling
• Authentication vs Authorization
• Observability

The Interview Framework

System design interviews are notoriously open-ended. We provide a structured framework to help you navigate from gathering requirements to deep-diving into specific components.

• The Interview Strategy

Select a topic from the sidebar to start building your design intuition!