Index of system design topics

Index of system design topics

Summaries of various system design topics, including pros and cons. Everything is a trade-off.

Each section contains links to more in-depth resources.

• The System Design Primer
• Motivation
  • Learn how to design large-scale systems
  • Learn from the open source community
  • Prep for the system design interview
• Anki flashcards
  • Coding Resource: Interactive Coding Challenges
  • Video Resources
• Contributing
• Index of system design topics
• Study guide
• How to approach a system design interview question
  • Step 1: Outline use cases, constraints, and assumptions
  • Step 2: Create a high level design
  • Step 3: Design core components
  • Step 4: Scale the design
  • Back-of-the-envelope calculations
  • Source(s) and further reading
• System design interview questions with solutions
  • Design Pastebin.com (or Bit.ly)
  • Design the Twitter timeline and search (or Facebook feed and search)
  • Design a web crawler
  • Design personal budget tracking app (Mint.com)
  • Design the data structures for a social network
  • Design a key-value store for a search engine
  • Design Amazon's sales ranking by category feature
  • Design a system that scales to millions of users on AWS
• Object-oriented design interview questions with solutions
• System design topics: start here
  • Step 1: Review the scalability video lecture
  • Step 2: Review the scalability article
  • Next steps
• Performance vs scalability
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Latency vs throughput
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Availability vs consistency
  • CAP theorem
  • CP - consistency and partition tolerance
  • AP - availability and partition tolerance
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Consistency patterns
  • Weak consistency
  • Eventual consistency
  • Strong consistency
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Availability patterns
  • Fail-over
  • Active-passive
  • Active-active
  • Disadvantage(s): failover
  • Replication
  • Master-slave and master-master
  • Availability in numbers
  • 99.9% availability - three 9s
  • 99.99% availability - four 9s
  • Availability in parallel vs in sequence
    • In sequence
    • In parallel
• Domain name system
  • Disadvantage(s): DNS
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Content delivery network
  • Push CDNs
  • Pull CDNs
  • Disadvantage(s): CDN
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Load balancer
  • Layer 4 load balancing
  • Layer 7 load balancing
  • Consistent Hashing
  • Horizontal scaling
  • Disadvantage(s): horizontal scaling
  • Disadvantage(s): load balancer
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Reverse proxy (web server)
  • Load balancer vs reverse proxy
  • Disadvantage(s): reverse proxy
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Application layer
  • Microservices
  • Service Discovery
  • Disadvantage(s): application layer
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Database
  • Relational database management system (RDBMS)
  • Master-slave replication
    • Disadvantage(s): master-slave replication
  • Master-master replication
    • Disadvantage(s): master-master replication
    • Disadvantage(s): replication
    • Source(s) and further reading: replication
  • Federation
    • Disadvantage(s): federation
    • Source(s) and further reading: federation
  • Sharding
    • Disadvantage(s): sharding
    • Source(s) and further reading: sharding
  • Denormalization
    • Disadvantage(s): denormalization
    • Source(s) and further reading: denormalization
  • SQL tuning
    • Tighten up the schema
    • Use good indices
    • Avoid expensive joins
    • Partition tables
    • Tune the query cache
    • Source(s) and further reading: SQL tuning
  • NoSQL
  • Key-value store
    • Source(s) and further reading: key-value store
  • Document store
    • Source(s) and further reading: document store
  • Wide column store
    • Source(s) and further reading: wide column store
  • Graph database
    • Source(s) and further reading: graph
  • Source(s) and further reading: NoSQL
  • SQL or NoSQL
  • Source(s) and further reading: SQL or NoSQL
• Cache
  • Client caching
  • CDN caching
  • Web server caching
  • Database caching
  • Application caching
  • Caching at the database query level
  • Caching at the object level
  • When to update the cache
  • Cache-aside
    • Disadvantage(s): cache-aside
  • Write-through
    • Disadvantage(s): write through
  • Write-behind (write-back)
    • Disadvantage(s): write-behind
  • Refresh-ahead
    • Disadvantage(s): refresh-ahead
  • Disadvantage(s): cache
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Asynchronism
  • Message queues
  • Task queues
  • Back pressure
  • Transactional Messaging
  • Disadvantage(s): asynchronism
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Communication
  • Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)
  • Source(s) and further reading: HTTP
  • Transmission control protocol (TCP)
  • User datagram protocol (UDP)
  • Source(s) and further reading: TCP and UDP
  • Remote procedure call (RPC)
  • Disadvantage(s): RPC
  • Representational state transfer (REST)
  • Disadvantage(s): REST
  • RPC and REST calls comparison
  • Source(s) and further reading: REST and RPC
• Security
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Appendix
  • Powers of two table
  • Source(s) and further reading
  • Latency numbers every programmer should know
  • Latency numbers visualized
  • Source(s) and further reading
  • Additional system design interview questions
  • Real world architectures
  • Company architectures
  • Company engineering blogs
  • Source(s) and further reading
• Interview preparation resources
  • Mock interviews
• Under development
• Credits
• Contact info
• License

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