Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Mastering System Design: 10 Key Pillars Every Engineer Should Know

 



Designing scalable, reliable, and efficient systems starts with understanding these 10 core pillars that form the foundation of modern system architecture.

1. APIs & Security Covers REST, gRPC, GraphQL, rate limiting, authentication methods (JWT, OAuth), TLS/SSL, and protection against DDoS and MITM attacks. 2. Caching Improves performance and reduces load with strategies like LRU, session persistence, and multi-level caching. 3. Proxies Includes reverse and forward proxies, load balancing methods, and advanced routing (e.g., path-based, least outstanding requests). 4. Messaging Ensures smooth inter-service communication with queues, pub/sub models, polling, streaming, and idempotent processing. 5. Features Clarifies system goals and constraints, aligning stakeholder needs while balancing consistency, availability, and tradeoffs. 6. Users Considers user types, access patterns, usage spikes, accessibility, and scalability based on demographics and behavior. 7. Data Model Explores relational vs NoSQL databases, indexing, horizontal scaling, sharding, ETL pipelines, and distributed query models like MapReduce. 8. Geography & Latency Tackles region-aware system performance using CDNs, DNS, network latency optimization, and response-time tuning. 9. Server Capacity Focuses on compute and storage provisioning (CPU, RAM, SSD), scaling strategies, parallel processing, and partitioning. 10. Availability & Microservices Addresses fault tolerance, microservices orchestration, leader election, redundancy, observability, and service mesh principles. Use this blueprint to build high-performance architectures that are scalable, secure, and production-ready. Whether you're preparing for system design interviews or building the next big product - these pillars are your foundation.

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