Interview Preparation | Building Blocks of Modern System Design

December 16th, 2023

Introduction

This summary will serve to further cement my learnings taken when reviewing the Building Blocks of Modern System Design module in the Grokking the Modern System Design Interview course, and I hope will provide some learnings to you as well.

Introduction to Building Blocks for Modern System Design

Modern system design is inherently modular. The key focus when designing is on extracting commonalities across design problems to create fundamental building blocks.

The Bottom-Up Approach for Modern System Design

The following are examples of building blocks when thinking about modern system design:

Domain Name System (DNS)

• Enables hierarchical and distributed naming systems, providing a standardized way to map domain names to IP addresses, crucial for internet-connected computers.

Load Balancers

• Distributes incoming client requests among available servers, optimizing resource utilization, enhancing performance, and providing fault tolerance.

Databases

• Facilitates structured storage, retrieval, modification, and deletion of data, supporting various data-processing procedures crucial for system functionality.

Key-Value Store

• Offers a scalable and flexible non-relational database solution, simplifying data storage in the form of key-value pairs for improved performance and configurability.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• Efficiently delivers and caches content close to end users, reducing latency and alleviating the burden on data centers, enhancing user experience.

Sequencer

• Generates unique IDs while maintaining causality, critical for ensuring order and consistency in distributed systems and databases.

Service Monitoring

• Critical for analyzing system health, detecting issues early, and providing insights into server-side and client-side errors, ensuring system reliability.

Distributed Caching

• Improves performance by storing frequently accessed data closer to users, reducing the need for repeated retrieval from the original source.

Distributed Messaging Queue

• Facilitates asynchronous communication between producers and consumers, promoting scalability, reliability, and decoupling in distributed systems.

Publish-Subscribe System

• Supports efficient service-to-service communication in serverless and microservices architectures, enhancing flexibility and responsiveness.

Rate Limiter

• Acts as a defensive layer, preventing excessive usage and ensuring fair distribution of resources, maintaining system stability.

Blob Store

• Provides a scalable storage solution for unstructured data, such as multimedia files and binary executables, supporting diverse content types.

Distributed Search

• Enhances user experience by enabling quick and relevant search results through efficient crawling, indexing, and searching of content.

Distributed Logging

• Designs a scalable and reliable system for efficient event logging in distributed systems, crucial for system analysis and debugging.

Distributed Task Scheduling

• Intelligently allocates resources to tasks, ensuring optimal system performance and meeting task-level and system-level goals in distributed environments.

Sharded Counters

• Offers an efficient distributed counting system, crucial for handling concurrent read/write requests, as seen in scenarios like social media interactions.