Systemdesign

System design is the process of defining an architecture that fulfills specified requirements for a set of stakeholders. It encompasses identifying system goals, components, interfaces, data models, deployment environments, and operational constraints. The outcome is a blueprint for how the system will be structured to meet functional and non-functional requirements such as scalability, reliability, maintainability, and security.

Typical activities include requirements analysis, high-level design, component decomposition, data modeling, and technology choices. Designers consider architectural styles such as layered, client-server, microservices, event-driven, or service-oriented architectures, and decide on interfaces, data flow, and boundaries between components. Data management decisions cover SQL versus NoSQL databases, caching, data partitioning, and consistency models. To support performance and resilience, designers employ patterns such as stateless services, load balancing, asynchronous messaging, replication, sharding, circuit breakers, and idempotency. Observability is essential, with logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting to enable monitoring and incident response. Security considerations include authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure defaults.

System design involves tradeoffs among latency, throughput, cost, and complexity, often framed by the CAP theorem. The design process includes prototyping, capacity planning, architectural reviews, and iterative refinement. Documentation comprises architecture diagrams, API contracts, data schemas, deployment guides, and runbooks. Operational concerns cover deployment, release management, rollback, incident handling, and evolution as requirements change. Common design pitfalls include overengineering, underestimating data growth, and insufficient observability.