Preface
System design has always been something I've wanted to familiarize myself with, and it's also something I've spent a lot of time preparing for when I was preparing for interviews. Therefore, I decided to spend some time in 2024 learning and documenting it, and I hope to produce a series of easy-to-understand articles to help any readers who are interested in system design.
What is System Design?
System design is the process of defining various system components, APIs, data models, and integrating the system to accomplish a large-scale system with certain functional requirements. Taking a video broadcasting platform like Youtube as an example, we not only need to consider how to efficiently store and transfer large amounts of video data, but also how to support high concurrency user requirements and how to ensure the stability and scalability of the system.
The challenge of system design is that it involves a wide range of knowledge areas, including but not limited to Internet technologies, parallel processing technologies, distributed system principles, database management, software development processes, and so on. The combination of this knowledge enables designers to create large and stable systems that are scalable and fault-tolerant. Decentralized systems are particularly complex, but through the specifications and knowledge associated with system design, we can better manage this complexity to effectively achieve system goals.
System design usually revolves around the following characteristics: reliability, effectiveness, and maintainability:
Reliable
A reliable system is able to keep running in the face of errors, malfunctions or crashes.
Effective
Effectiveness means that the system meets all business needs and user expectations.
Maintainable
Maintainability ensures that the system is easy to manage and can be flexibly scaled up or down to facilitate the addition of new features.
Building Block
We usually isolate different system design components and combine them for different functions to build a software system. For example, a load balancer, a database. The advantage of this separation of components is that we can focus on the problem and think about which components are needed to build a software system that meets the requirements. In addition, if we need to expand the system in response to system traffic and scale, we can explore each component in detail.
Who fits into this series of posts?
This series is intended for the following readers, who are completely new to programs and software, and would recommend tracking down the Instagram The above is a more basic illustration of what you need to know.
Software Developer
System design is usually an interview topic for senior engineers, architects, and chief engineers. The scope of the system design questions is very broad, no matter front-end engineers, back-end engineers, full-end engineers, maintenance engineers, are in a software system, responsible for a specific area. Therefore, if you want to have a more comprehensive understanding of the software system, you must understand the system design.
System Design Trainee
System design is an interesting topic, and we can all learn more about the field of software technology in the process of learning system design. You can also learn how a large company designs and builds a software system from scratch and scales it up over time through some real-world examples.
Interview Preparer
As mentioned earlier, system design is an interview topic for many technology companies targeting senior engineers, architects, and chief engineers, so for software engineers who are preparing for interviews with technology companies, system design is often an important part of the interview. By learning system design, you can better prepare for the interview and improve the chances of passing the interview.
Anticipate a series of articles that will explain
This series will be divided into several parts, namely System Design Concepts, System Design Components, and System Design Problems:
Design Concept
Before we can actually talk about system design, we must explain the concepts and theories of system design, including the common theory of CAP, methods for calculating system traffic, and the concept of system design abstraction. It is only when these concepts are in place that it becomes clearer to the reader why system design was created.
Building Block
In the System Design Components chapter, I will go over common system design components. Including the basic components of system design, each component will be explained in detail in several separate articles. This section will not only help us to learn more about different system design components, but will also help us to learn more about software applications.
System Design Issues
This section is the core of the series and focuses on solving real-world system design problems. A number of different software design problems are provided and explained, each covering a broad range of topics from data processing to user interface design. Through these problems, readers will have the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world situations and learn how to design systems that are scalable, efficient, and reliable.
Other article references
2023 Yahoo! Software Engineer Software Engineer Interview
What are Web Beacons? What you need to know about tools other than cookies
Why do big companies use Nx ? Monorepo Tool 5 Minute Quick Build
Do you really know Monorepo? 5 minutes to learn about front-end mega-architecture.
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