System Design Intro

When studying system design for the first time, the concepts you'll need to learn may seem fairly random and all of over the place

• SQL vs NoSQL
• Different caching strategies
• Horizontal vs vertical partitioning
• etc.

And while it may seem very random at the start, eventually you'll have a surface level understanding of common system design interview concepts.

The goal is to eventually be able to say during an interview:

• "How I've solved this problem in the past"
• "When I previously had to choose between..."
• "I've built a system to address a similar problem and this is how we solved it"

Concept Overview

1. Foundations: Single Server

• CPU
• RAM
• DISK
• Network basics
• Client Service Model
• DNS
• HTTP/HTTPS
• REST basics
• LAtency vs Throughput
• Back of envelope estimation

2. Scaling a Single Service

• Vertical vs Horizontal scaling
• Load balancing (round robin, least connections, consistent hashing)
• Stateless vs Stateful Services