Must Know System Design Building Blocks

These are divided into 6 broad categories

Distributed Computing

• Distributed message queues facilitate async communication and decouple services

• Distributed caching improves performance by storing frequently accessed data in memory

• A Distributed task scheduler manages and coordinates the execution of tasks

Scalability and Performance

• Scaling services help adjust the capacity of services to handle changes in demand

• CDNs serve content from geographically closer locations to improve performance and reduce latency.

• Consistent hashing minimizes the remapping of keys when nodes are added or removed

Service Management

• Service discovery enables services to find and communicate with each other without hard-coding network locations

Networking and Communication

• DNS translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses

• Load Balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers

• API Gateway acts as a single entry point for a group of microservices

Data Storage and Management

• Databases store and manage structured data

• Object storage helps store complex objects like images, videos, and documents

• Sharding helps horizontally partition data across multiple nodes

• Replication helps horizontally scale the database by copying data to multiple nodes

Observability and Resiliency

Gain insights into the system’s internal state through metrics, logging, and tracing.