Welcome to the foundational concepts of System Design. This phase covers the core principles that form the backbone of any well-designed distributed system.
Why Fundamentals Matter
Before diving into complex system architectures, it’s crucial to understand these fundamental concepts. They will help you:
- Make informed decisions about system architecture
- Identify and solve scalability challenges
- Ensure system reliability and availability
- Balance trade-offs in system design
Core Topics Covered
1. Scalability
- Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
- Understanding when to scale up vs scale out
- Cost implications and trade-offs
- Real-world scaling strategies
2. High Availability
- System Reliability
- Fault tolerance mechanisms
- Redundancy strategies
- Failover systems
3. Performance Metrics
- Latency
- Network latency
- Processing time
- Response time considerations
- Throughput
- System capacity
- Performance bottlenecks
- Optimization strategies
4. System Consistency
- CAP Theorem
- Consistency
- Availability
- Partition Tolerance
- Real-world applications and trade-offs
- ACID vs BASE Properties
- Understanding transaction models
- Consistency models in distributed systems
- When to use each approach
Last Updated: January 27, 2025