Designing scalable, maintainable, and high-performance systems takes more than just clean code—it requires a strong grasp of architecture, trade-offs, and real-world constraints.
This System Design Deep Dive series is your structured roadmap to mastering modern system architecture. Whether you're preparing for interviews or architecting production-grade systems, this guide walks you from foundational principles to advanced scalability techniques.
You'll explore essential topics like SOLID principles, ACID principles, Design patterns, and the CAP theorem, then move into distributed system strategies such as caching, sharding, auto-scaling, and the SAGA pattern. Each topic is explained with practical examples and visual aids to help you connect theory to implementation.
Part 1: Foundational Principles for Scalable Systems
- 🔗 SOLID Principles – Object-oriented foundation for modular, testable design
- 🔗 ACID Principles – Database transaction reliability and integrity
- 🔗 CAP Theorem – Trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance
- 🔗 Consistent Hashing – A key distributed systems technique for partitioning and scalability
- 🔗 Design Patterns – Proven reusable solutions for common design problems
Part 2: Designing and Estimating Real-World Systems
- 🔗 Asking Clarifying Questions – Define the problem before you design
- 🔗 Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation – Quickly sizing systems for expected load
- 🔗 High-Level Design (HLD) – Macro architecture: components, flow, and integration
- 🔗 Low-Level Design (LLD) – Detailed class/interface design, database schema, etc.
Part 3: Scaling Infrastructure and Distributed Systems
- 🔗 Distributed Caching – Reduce latency and backend load
- 🔗 Bloom Filters – Memory-efficient existence checks for caching
- 🔗 Database Sharding – Horizontally scaling your data layer
- 🔗 SAGA Pattern – Managing distributed transactions and eventual consistency
- 🔗 Service Discovery with Eureka – Dynamic detection of services in a distributed setup
- 🔗 Auto-Scaling with Kubernetes – Elastic infrastructure based on load
- 🔗 Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) – Speed up static asset delivery across geographies
Final Thoughts
System design isn’t about memorizing patterns—it's about deeply understanding trade-offs and making informed decisions that suit your application's unique context.
Should you prioritize consistency or availability? Optimize for latency or cost? Move fast or build with safety and resilience? These are the kinds of decisions real-world engineers and architects face every day.
This series is crafted to help you develop intuition around those decisions. Each post stands on its own, but together they form a cohesive guide to designing scalable, resilient, and high-performance systems.
Tip: Reading is just the beginning. Apply what you learn to side projects, interview prep, or architecture reviews to truly master these concepts.
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