System-Design-and-Scalability

Handling the Questions

• Communicate
• Go broad first
• Use the whiteboard
• Acknowledge the concerns
• Be careful about assumptions
• State the assumptions explicitly
• Estimate when necessary
• Drive

Design: Step-By-Step

• Step 1: Scope the Problem
• Step 2: Make Reasonable Assumptions
• Step 3: Draw the Major Components
• Step 4: Identify the Key Issues
• Step 5: Redesign for the Key Issues

Algorithms that Scale: Step-By-Step

• Step 1: Ask Questions
• Step 2: Make Believe
• Step 3: Get Real
• Step 4: Solve Problems

Key Concepts

• Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling
• Load Balancer
• Database Denormalization and NoSQL
• Database Partitioning (Sharding)
  • Vertical Partitioning
  • Key-Based (or Hash-Based) Partitioning
  • Directory-Based Partitioning
• Caching
• Asynchronous Processing & Queues
• Networking Metrics
  • Bandwidth
  • Throughput
  • Latency
• MapReduce

Considerations

• Failures
• Availability and Reliability
• Read-heavy vs. Write-heavy
• Security

There is no "perfect" system