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?