Overview

System design is all about building robust, functional, scalable applications.
Where the coding interview serves primarily as an assessment of your problem-solving ability, the systems design interview is a test of your engineering knowledge veiled behind the facade of an open-ended design question.
Systems design is the process of defining the architecture, product design, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. Systems design could be seen as the application of systems theory to product development.

Design Fundamentals

System design interview questions are intentionally unclear(vague).
It could be just stated in few words (design Uber, Facebook) and the interviewee should take that discussion to 45 mins interview.
- We should able to answer how the system should behave.
- Type of the system you're really building.
- What kind of functionality the system supports.
- Characteristics we're gonna value in our system.
Performing investigations requires lot of design systems fundamental knowledge
System designs is lot more subjectivity. A proposed solution may or may not 100% correct.
It's invterviewee job to explain why the proposed solution is the potential one.
Using client server model to be able to design any modern day system.
Network protocols, we need to have some understanding of how machines communicate each other in order to be able to design a system properly.
We'r talking about design fundamentals like
- availability,
- wait and see,
- throughput
- redundancy
- consistency
Components of a system
- load balancers,
- proxies,
- caches,
- rate limiting,
- leader election,
Real tech/services uses in a system
- Zookeeper,
- XCD,
- Nginx,
- Redis
- AWS,
- GCP