Module 1

System Design Fundamentals

Master the foundational concepts that underpin every system design: gathering requirements, understanding trade-offs, the CAP theorem, and estimation techniques.

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System Design Process

Understanding requirements, trade-offs, estimation, and the CAP theorem.

Before designing any system, you must understand what you're building. This involves:

Functional Requirements - What the system should do:

Core features and use cases
User interactions and flows
Data inputs and outputs

Non-Functional Requirements - How the system should behave:

Scalability: How many users? Requests per second?
Availability: What uptime is acceptable? (99.9% = 8.7 hours downtime/year)
Latency: How fast should responses be?
Consistency: Is eventual consistency acceptable?

Key Questions to Ask:

Who are the users? How many?
What are the peak usage patterns?
What data needs to be stored?
What are the read/write ratios?

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