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006-Introduction To Building Blocks For Modern System Design

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63 views6 pages

006-Introduction To Building Blocks For Modern System Design

Uploaded by

Thao Nguyen
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Introduction to Building Blocks for Modern

System Design
Learn how a system design is like using Lego pieces to make bigger, fascinating
artifacts.

We'll cover the following

• The bottom-up approach for modern system design


• Conventions

The bottom-up approach for modern system


design
System design problems usually have some similarities, though specific details
are often unique. We have extracted these similarities across design problems as
the basic building blocks we’ll be covering. One example of a building block is a
load-balancing component, which we’ll probably use in every design problem in
one way or the other.

The purpose of separating the building blocks is to thoroughly discuss their


design just once. This means that later we can use them anywhere without
having to go over them in detail again. We can think about building blocks as
bricks to construct more effective, capable systems.

Many of the building blocks we discuss are also available for actual use in the
public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud
Platform (GCP). We can use such constructs to build a system to further cement
our understanding. (We won’t construct the system in this course, but we’ve left
it as an exercise for interested learners.)
Using building blocks to devise a bottom-up approach for designing systems

We’ll discuss the following building blocks in detail:

1. Domain Name System: This building block


focuses on how to design hierarchical and
distributed naming systems for computers
connected to the Internet via different
Internet protocols.

2. Load Balancers: Here, we’ll understand the


design of a load balancer, which is used to
fairly distribute incoming clients’ requests
among a pool of available servers. It also
reduces load and can bypass failed servers.

3. Databases: This building block enables us to


store, retrieve, modify, and delete data in
connection with different data-processing
procedures. Here, we’ll discuss database
types, replication, partitioning, and analysis
of distributed databases.
4. Key-Value Store: It is a non-relational
database that stores data in the form of a key-
value pair. Here, we’ll explain the design of a
key-value store along with important
concepts such as achieving scalability,
durability, and configurability.

5. Content Delivery Network: In this chapter,


we’ll design a content delivery network
(CDN) that’s used to keep viral content such
as videos, images, audio, and webpages. It
efficiently delivers content to end users while
reducing latency and burden on the data
centers.

6. Sequencer: In this building block, we’ll focus


on the design of a unique IDs generator with
a major focus on maintaining causality. It
also explains three different methods for
generating unique IDs.

7. Service Monitoring: Monitoring systems are


critical in distributed systems because they
help analyze the system and alert the
stakeholders if a problem occurs. Monitoring
is often useful to get early warning systems
so that system administrators can act ahead
of an impending problem becoming a huge
issue. Here, we’ll build two monitoring
systems, one for the server-side and the other
for client-side errors.
8. Distributed Caching: In this building block,
we’ll design a distributed caching system
where multiple cache servers coordinate to
store frequently accessed data.

9. Distributed Messaging Queue: In this


building block, we’ll focus on the design of a
queue consisting of multiple servers, which is
used between interacting entities called
producers and consumers. It helps decouple
producers and consumers, results in
independent scalability, and enhances
reliability.

10. Publish-Subscribe System: In this building


block, we’ll focus on the design of an
asynchronous service-to-service
communication method called a pub-sub
system. It is popular in serverless,
microservices architectures and data
processing systems.

11. Rate Limiter: Here, we’ll design a system


that throttles incoming requests for a service
based on the predefined limit. It is generally
Introduction
used as atodefensive
Building Blocks
layerforfor services to avoid
Modern System Design
their excessive usage-whether intended or
unintended.

12. Blob Store: This building block focuses on a


storage solution for unstructured data—for
example, multimedia files and binary
executables.
13. Distributed Search: A search system takes a
query from a user and returns relevant
content in a few seconds or less. This
building block focuses on the three integral
components: crawl, index, and search.

14. Distributed Logging: Logging is an I/O


intensive operation that is time-consuming
and slow. Here, we’ll design a system that
allows services in a distributed system to log
their events efficiently. The system will be
made scalable and reliable.

15. Distributed Task Scheduling: We’ll design a


distributed task scheduler system that
mediates between tasks and resources. It
intelligently allocates resources to tasks to
meet task-level and system-level goals. It’s
often used to offload background processing
to be completed asynchronously.

16. Sharded Counters: This building block


demonstrates an efficient distributed
counting system to deal with millions of
concurrent read/write requests, such as likes
on a celebrity’s tweet.

We have topologically ordered the building blocks so the building blocks that
depend on others come later.

Conventions
For elaboration, we’ll use a “Requirements” section whenever we design a
building block (and a design problem). The “Requirements” section will highlight
the deliverables we expect from the developed design. “Requirements” will have
two sub-categories:

1. Functional requirements: These represent the features a user of the


designed system will be able to use. For example, the system will allow a
user to search for content using the search bar.
2. Non-functional requirements (NFRs): The non-functional requirements
are criteria based on which the user of a system will consider the system
usable. NFR may include requirements like high availability, low latency,
scalability, and so on.

Let’s start with our building blocks.

Back Mark As Completed Next

Examples of Resource Estimation Introduction to Domain Name Syste…

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