System Design

Complete guide to consistency models covering strong consistency, eventual consistency, CAP theorem, linearizability, and trade-offs in distributed systems.

Understanding abstractions in system design covering abstraction layers, APIs, interfaces, and how they help manage complexity in distributed systems.

Most good organisations expect their engineering hires to have gone through a system design interview. For a vast majority of people this might sound like a weird thing to do as most people don’t individually design large scale systems. So expecting someone to design a highly scalable and available system in less than 60 minutes is a daunting task. We must also consider the fact that not everyone gets to work in organisations that build large scale distributed systems. I think the time when I worked in FactSet was when I dealt with extremely large volumes of data and we focussed on the performance of queries from the database to sub 5 ms in order to ensure that even with latency, users would be able to see their graphs plotted in a second or so. Most applications wouldn’t really care about performance at that level because for their line business it probably doesn’t matter that much. ...