Modern System Design: An Engineering Perspective on Building Resilient, Scalable and Maintainable Computer Systems

IntroductionThis book is your concise guide to the key principles of contemporary system design, crafted to help you grasp and achieve your design objectives. We'll explore critical concepts in fewer than 80 pages, offering a digestible approach for easy reviewing and understanding. My philosophy is simple: brevity and clarity. By distilling information to its most essential, we not only command the reader's attention but also enhance their understanding and recall. With this guide, you'll cut through the fluff and focus on what truly matters in modern system design.About the AuthorSam Elgalab is a senior tech lead who has spent most of his career working for big tech companies. He has designed, implemented and deployed large-scale systems and interviewed hundreds of software engineer candidates.Who should read this book?Whether you're a professional seeking to refresh your knowledge or new to the subject, a student aiming to grasp distributed systems and best practices for building them at scale, or someone preparing for a job interview on system design, this book is a must-read for you.Table of ContentsChapter 1. Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD1.1 Infrastructure as Code1.2 Version Control1.3 Continuous Integration and Deployment1.4 Deployment and Service ReliabilityChapter 2. Compute Infrastructure2.1 On-Premises and the Cloud2.2 Bare-metal Servers2.3 Virtual Machines2.4 Containers2.5 Serverless ComputingChapter 3. Scalability, Availability and Performance3.1 Scalability3.1.1 Service Discovery and Client-side Load Balancing3.1.2 Service Load Balancers3.2 Performance (Response Time)3.3 Resiliency and Availability3.3.1 Availability During Deployments3.3.2 Availability Zones3.4 Auto-scaling and Serverless3.5 Managing Clients3.6 Managing Dependencies3.6.1 Retries and Dependency Failures3.6.2 Timeouts3.6.3 Handling Consistent Dependency Failures3.6.4 Latency Spikes and Request Hedging3.6.5 When Dependencies Can’t Support Peak LoadChapter 4. Application Programming Interfaces4.1 Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)4.2 Representational State Transfer (REST)4.3 GraphQL4.4 Best Practices for API DesignChapter 5. Metrics, Monitoring, and Operational Readiness5.1 Metrics5.2 Monitoring (Metric Alarms)5.3 Logs5.4 Operational ReadinessChapter 6. Database Systems6.1 OLTP vs OLAP6.2 Relational Database Systems6.2.1 ACID Properties6.3 NoSQL Database Systems6.4 Data Replication6.4.1 Leader-based replication6.4.2 Leaderless Replication6.5 Data Partitioning/Sharding6.5.1 Hot Partitions6.5.2 6.5.2 Consistent Hashing6.6 Caching6.7 Indexing6.8 SQL vs NoSQLChapter 7. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)7.1 Web Server Storage7.2 Cloud Object Storage7.3 Content Delivery NetworksChapter 8. Message Queues and PubSub8.1 Message Queues8.2 Dead Letter Queues (DLQs)8.3 PubSubChapter 9. Batch Processing9.1 Introduction to Batch Processing9.2 MapReduceChapter 10. The System Design InterviewChapter 11. System Design Interview Exercises11.1 Social Media Network11.2 Browser Parental Control11.3 Tiny URL Service11.4 Typeahead Suggestions11.5 Find Nearby Venues/Friends Read more