System Design

Introduction to databases for system design covering data storage, retrieval, relational databases, NoSQL, and choosing the right database for your application.

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

Complete guide to NoSQL databases including document stores, key-value stores, column-family databases, and graph databases for unstructured data.

Complete guide to database resiliency covering replication (master-slave, multi-master), backup strategies, and disaster recovery for system design interviews.

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

Complete guide to understanding DNS (Domain Name System), how it works as the internet’s phonebook, DNS architecture, and resource record types for system design interviews.

Introduction to system design fundamentals covering core concepts, design principles, thinking patterns, and the philosophy behind building large-scale systems.

In my career spanning financial market data platforms, telecom systems, insurance quoting systems and energy billing, I’ve come to appreciate that the craft of true software engineering isn’t about avoiding complexity, it is about choosing the right kind of complexity. In the world of event-driven architectures (EDA), when a microservice needs to change its state and notify the rest of the world of this event, it faces a fundamental engineering challenge, known as the Dual Write Problem. This is the Achilles’ heel of distributed systems: ensuring that a local database update and an external event publication are an atomic pair. This operation has to be atomic. The write-to-the-database and the event publication has to be either both successful or both fail. One cannot succeed on its own as it would break consistency. ...

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.