Arpit's Newsletter read by 80000+ engineers
Weekly essays on real-world system design, distributed systems, or a deep dive into some super-clever algorithm.
System Design is tricky but it does not have to be difficult- be it a technical discussion at your workplace or your next big interview. Let’s talk about how to approach System Design. Something I compiled from 10 years of my career.
System Design is all about translating and solving customer needs and business requirements into something tangible. The output system could be an application, a microservice, a library, or even hardware.
There are a couple of approaches that we can use to design any system out there. Picking one over the other depends on the company you work for and the flexibility it provides.
The Spiral Approach pans like a spiral in which you start with some core that you are comfortable with (database, communication protocol, queue. etc) and build your system around it. Every single component you add to the design is something that you are pretty confident about and can proceed with the added complexities.
For example:
In the Incremental MVP-based approach we with a Day 0 design and then see how each component behaves at scale by dry-running it; after identifying the bottlenecks you fix them and re-iterate. You stop the iteration once you are happy with the final product. This kind of approach is typically seen in startups where they do not want to invest in architecture and quickly roll out features.
For example:
Here's the video ⤵
Alongside my daily work, I also teach some highly practical courses, with a no-fluff no-nonsense approach, that are designed to spark engineering curiosity and help you ace your career.
A no-fluff masterclass that helps experienced engineers form the right intuition to design and implement highly scalable, fault-tolerant, extensible, and available systems.
An in-depth and self-paced course for absolute beginners to become great at designing and implementing scalable, available, and extensible systems.
A self-paced and hands-on course covering Redis internals - data structures, algorithms, and some core features by re-implementing them in Go.
Arpit's Newsletter read by 80000+ engineers
Weekly essays on real-world system design, distributed systems, or a deep dive into some super-clever algorithm.