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System Design: Building Scalable Distributed Systems

Design large-scale systems. Load balancing, caching, database sharding, and scalability patterns.

Seena Singh 18 min readFebruary 8, 2025

System Design Fundamentals

Design systems that scale to millions of users.

Key Concepts

Scalability

  • Horizontal vs vertical
  • Stateless services
  • Database scaling

Load Balancing

  • Round robin
  • Least connections
  • Health checks

Caching

  • CDN
  • Application cache
  • Database cache

Database

  • Replication
  • Sharding
  • Partitioning

Common Patterns

  • Read replicas
  • Write-ahead logging
  • Message queues
  • Circuit breakers

Design Process

  1. Clarify requirements
  2. Estimate scale
  3. Design high-level
  4. Deep dive components
  5. Address bottlenecks

Conclusion

System design skills are essential for building reliable, scalable systems.

System DesignScalabilityArchitecture

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