System design interview

Acing the system design interview need right set of knowledge , a mindset shift and knowing the basics of

1. “Single (node) system design”
2. Multi node system design i.e Distributed system design.

My goal with this series is to shift the way you think about system design and we will work with three pillars of reasoning through out (And they are why? , when? and how?.

1. Why? (why do you need the system )
2. When? (When will use the system and when you will not. What are the tradeoffs )
3. How? (How is the system able to do the task at the desired speed and scale)

These three pillar are the key to understand any computer system. We will keep coming back to these questions again and again.

1. Single node system design example involve designing a (single node) Database system, designing a file system like ext4 etc. Although this looks simple understanding these are the key to understanding the large scale distributed system and lot of ideas are borrowed from these single node “high performance” system to the distributed systems.

2. Understanding a distributed system is essential in designing, implementing and maintaining a large scale system. Hence there is no surprise lot of tech companies focus their system design interviews around it. My goal for this series of blog are

1. Improve the readers understanding the distributed systems.
2. Improve the readers ability to answer distributed system questions with confidence and necessary knowledge.

There will be about 50 different related posts which will be best consumed sequentially. I will also have Q&A style post to access your knowledge.

Lets get started:

1. Why and when Distributed Systems are used?