System Design

Resources

• Hello Interview

• Design Gurus

• System Design Primer Github page

• ByteByteGo YouTube channel

Core Concepts

• CAP theorem

• Fault tolerance and high availability

• Distributed consensus (Paxos, Raft)

• Scalability (vertical vs horizontal)

• Load balancing

• Caching (LRU, TTL, cache invalidation)

• CDN (Content Delivery Network) basics

• Rate limiting and throttling

• Message queues and asynchronous processing

• Microservices architecture vs Monolith

• API design and versioning

• Authentication and authorization

• Monitoring, logging, and alerting

• Database design (SQL vs NoSQL)

• Data partitioning (sharding) and replication

• Consistency models (strong, eventual)

• Indexing and query optimization

• Data backup and disaster recovery

As per 2025, this diagram below is a good template to design a common application.
Source: System Design Primer Github page