Scalability

Complete guide to understanding system design interviews, what interviewers expect, and how to prepare effectively for distributed systems and scalability questions.

Complete guide to database scalability covering sharding strategies, partitioning, consistent hashing, and horizontal vs vertical scaling for system design.

Complete CDN design walkthrough covering architecture, edge servers, caching policies, content propagation, cache invalidation, and serving content globally at scale.

Complete key-value store design covering requirements, API design, consistent hashing, data partitioning, replication strategies, failure handling, and scaling.

Complete guide to load balancers covering algorithms (round-robin, least connections), global vs local load balancing, stateful vs stateless approaches, and scaling strategies.

Complete guide to scalability covering horizontal and vertical scaling strategies, stateless architecture, caching, database sharding, and handling massive traffic.

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. ...