System Design Notes
What is System Design?
System design involves taking a set of requirements and building a product from them.
It's a generic term that typically entails deciding on the architecture of a system.
Example: Designing the next Facebook requires:
A database to store data.
API servers to serve requests.
CDNs to serve images.
Components and Modules
System design includes:
Deciding on the architecture.
Deciding on the components.
Deciding on modules.
Example: Facebook design
The entire Facebook is the system.
Authentication/authorization is a module within Facebook.
Web servers, databases, and caches are components within the authentication module.
Flavors of System Design
System design comes in three flavors:
Designing architecture.
Designing components.
Designing modules.
It's crucial to understand how different parts of the system interact with each other to solve the bigger problem (e.g., building Facebook).
Product development life cycle:
Decide on architecture.
Decide on components.
Decide on modules.
Relevance of System Design
System design is popular because every tech product is a designed system.
Companies need engineers to design these systems.
System design is closely related to product development.
It involves solving problems using real-world tools like databases, caches, CDNs, servers, compute, encryption, and decryption.
Day-to-Day Relevance
System design is very close to what engineers do daily.
Upon joining a team, engineers are often presented with design documents explaining the product's architecture.
Understanding system design is essential for career growth.
As engineers advance to senior roles, they spend a significant amount of time (e.g., 80%) designing systems.
The focus shifts to designing the best architecture possible to build the best solution with minimal cost.
Side Effects of System Design
System design can make other tasks seem uninteresting due to its engaging nature.
Engineers get engrossed in solving problems like authentication or response time optimization.
The satisfaction of building a system and seeing users interact with it is rewarding.
System design involves solving real problems, unlike some made-up scenarios in data structures and algorithms.
Benefits of System Design
System design provides a more relatable experience compared to theoretical concepts.
It teaches how to break down a big problem statement into smaller, solvable sub-problems.
It rewires the brain to think in a structured way, which helps in various aspects of life.
It encourages consideration of all cases, including fault tolerance and availability.
System Design Approach
The process involves:
Breaking down the problem statement into solvable subproblems.
Deciding on key components.
Defining the responsibilities of each component.
Setting boundaries to avoid overlapping responsibilities.
Key Challenges
For every component, consider the key challenges in scaling it.
Think intuitively about building scalable systems.
Focus on fault tolerance and availability.
Consider how the system will recover from the failure of even minor components.
Course Overview
The course will cover a lot of theoretical parts in a practical way to build a strong foundation.
It will cover a set of interesting systems, each varying differently from the others.
Conclusion
The introduction covers the basics of system design.
Future videos will use practical examples to understand how systems are built and how to apply first principles to solve problems.