System Design Notes

A simple and comprehensive guide about system design, bringing compiled information about principles and insights.

Introduction

Over the past decade I had the opportunity to work with many talented people, who was willing to share their knowledge and who mentored me for a very long time. I always had my personal goals and desire to learn, but sharing what I have learnt just became a passion which I start to nurture a few years ago. I truly hope these notes can guide future generation of engineers when making architectural decisions and expanding their knowledge about different solution alternatives when considering its trade-offs when applying them on system design.

Content

In this repository you going to find many notes, grouped by context. The follow structure resume all texts in each chapter:

• Basics
  • Computer Architecture
    • Hard Disk
    • Memory
    • CPU
    • Cache
  • Web Application Architecture
    • Servers
    • Server Scalability
    • Vertical Scale
    • Horizontal Scale
    • Clients
    • Logs
    • Metrics
    • Alerts
  • Design Requirements
    • Moving Data
    • Store Data
    • Transforming Data
    • The good, the Bad and the Ugly
    • Factors of System Design
    • Availability
    • Reliability, Fault Tolerance, Redundancy
    • Throughput
    • Latency
• Network
  • IP
    • Network
    • IP
    • Anatomy of IPV4
    • IVP6
    • Static and Dynamic IP
  • Transmission
    • Data Packets
    • Headers
    • Payload
    • Packet Structure
  • Layers
    • Network Layer
    • Transport Layer
    • Application Layer
  • Types of Network
    • Types of Network
    • A bit more about IPs: Private and Public IP
    • Ports
  • TCP
    • TPC (Transmission Control Protocol)
    • How it actually works?
  • UDP
    • UDP (User Datagram Protocol)
    • Why UDP over TCP?
  • DNS
    • DNS (Domain Name System)
    • Name Registrars
  • URL
    • URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
    • Protocol
    • Domain
    • Subdomain
    • Primary Domain
    • TDL
    • Path
• Servers
  • HTTP
    • HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
    • HTTP structure
    • Client/Server model
    • HTTP Message - client
    • Start Line
    • Request Method
    • Headers
    • Body
    • HTTP Message - server
    • Start Line
    • Status Code and Status Message
    • TLS (Transport Layer Security)
  • RPC
    • RPC (Remote Procedure Call)
  • WebSocket
    • Pooling
    • Bidirectional communication
  • API
    • API (Application Programming Interface)
    • API Paradigms
    • Server Paradigms
  • Rest
    • Rest (Representation State Transfer)
    • Data exchange
    • Limitations
  • GraphQL
    • Query
    • How it works?
    • Multation
  • gRPC
    • gRPC (gRPC Remote Procedure Call)
    • Protocol Buffers or just Protobuff
    • Protobuff schema example
  • API Design
    • Resource naming
    • Subresource, Path Param, Query Param, & Pagination
• Cache
  • Caching
    • Caching
    • The downside of caching
    • The computer cache
    • L1 Level
    • L2 Level
    • L3 Level
    • How cache is controlled and managed by CPU?
    • The web browser/client case
    • Cache Ratio
    • The server case
    • Write around
    • Write through
    • Write back
    • Eviction cache policies
    • First in First out (FIFO)
    • Least Recently Used (LRU)
    • Least Frequently Used (LFU)
  • CDN
    • CDN (Content Delivery Network)
    • Push CDN
    • Pull CDN
• Proxy
  • Proxy
    • Forward Proxy Server
    • Reverse Proxy Server
    • Distributed Denial of Service
    • Reverse Proxy Server - The shield of backend systems
  • Load Balance
    • Rounding Robing
    • Weighted Round Robing (WRR)
    • Least number of connections
    • User Location
    • Layer 4 Load Balancing
    • Layer 7 Load Balancing
    • Consistent Hashing
• Databases
  • SQL
    • Tables
    • Why Relational databases?
    • Atomicity
    • Consistency
    • Isolation
    • Durability
    • Trade-offs
  • NoSQL
    • NoSQL (Not Only SQL)
    • Key/Value store
    • Document store
    • Wide Column store
    • Graph store
    • Why NoSQL?
    • Eventual consistency
  • Object Store
    • Object Store
    • The file system approach
    • The object store approach
  • Data Replication & Sharding
    • Replication
    • Synchronous Replication
    • Asynchronous Replication
    • Multi-Master Replication
    • Sharding
  • Cap Theorem
    • Partition Tolerance
    • Availability
    • Consistency
    • The CAP Threorem extension
• Big Data
  • Queues
    • Queues
    • Push Model
    • Pull Model
    • Acknoeledge signal
    • Dead Letter Queue (DLQ)
    • Publish and Subscribe Model (Pub/Sub)
  • ETL
    • ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
    • Cronjobs
  • Batch
  • Stream
    • Stream processing

References

The follow are some of the references I've used to write these notes and some references are insightful material to expand from what I have here, its important to say that some texts also come with links which can be used to dive deep into the subjects. I may add extra links over time.

• Books
  • Design Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
  • Designing Distributed Systems by Brendan Burns
  • Software Architecture: The hard parts by Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage
• Sites
  • neetcode.io: System Design for beginners course
  • geek for geeks: System Design Tutorial

Author

• Bruno Felipe

License

Shield:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.