System Design General Guides - from Grokking SDI

  1. 1. Requirements Clarifications
  2. 2. Back of the envelope estimation
  3. 3. System Interface Definition
  4. 4. Define Data Model
  5. 5. High level design
  6. 6. Detailed Design
  7. 7 Identifying and resolving bottlenecks

1. Requirements Clarifications

  • Ask about the exact scope of the problem
    • For a twitter like system design
      • will users of our service be able to post tweets and follow others?
      • Create and display user’s timeline?
      • Tweets contain photos and videos?
      • Front end design too?
      • Searchable tweets?
      • Display hot trending topics?
      • Push notification for new tweets?

2. Back of the envelope estimation

  • estimate the scale of the system we are going to design

    • could help later when we will be focusing on scaling, partitioning, load balancing and caching

      • what scale is expected

        • number of new tweets
        • number of tweet views
        • number of timeline generations per sec
      • how much storage will we need

        • videos and photos will play important role on our estimation
      • what network bandwidth usage are we expecting

        • crucial in deciding how we will manage traffic and balance load between servers

3. System Interface Definition

Establish exact contract expected from the system

postTweet(user_id, tweet_data, tweet_location, user_location, timestamp, …)  

generateTimeline(user_id, current_time, user_location, …)  

markTweetFavorite(user_id, tweet_id, timestamp, …)  

4. Define Data Model

Define the data model, to clarify how data will flow between different components of the system. Later, will guide for data partitioning and management.

User: UserID, Name, Email, DoB, CreationData, LastLogin, etc.
Tweet: TweetID, Content, TweetLocation, NumberOfLikes, TimeStamp, etc.
UserFollow: UserID1, UserID2
FavoriteTweets: UserID, TweetID, TimeStamp

5. High level design

  • Draw a block diagram with 5 - 6 boxes representing the core components of our system. We need to identify enough components that are needed to solve the actual problem from end2end.
  • For twitter
    • Multiple application servers to serve all the read/ write requests with load balancers in front of them for traffic distributions
    • we could have separate servers for handling specific traffic (like much more read than write)
    • Efficient database that can store all the tweets and can support a huge number of reads
    • Also need a distributed file storage system for storing photos and videos

6. Detailed Design

  • Dig deeper to 2 or 3 components
    • present different approaches
    • pros and cons
    • explain why we prefer one on the other
    • consider tradeoffs between different options while keeping system contraints in mind
  • Question Examples
    • Since we will be storing a massive amount of data, how should we partition our data to distribute it to multiple databases? Should we try to store all the data of a user on the same database? What issue could it cause?
    • How will we handle hot users who tweet a lot or follow lots of people?
    • Since users’ timeline will contain the most recent (and relevant) tweets, should we try to store our data in such a way that is optimized for scanning the latest tweets?
    • How much and at which layer should we introduce cache to speed things up?
    • What components need better load balancing?

7 Identifying and resolving bottlenecks

  • Discuss as many bottlenecks as possible and different approaches to mitigate them
    • Any single point of failure in our system?
    • Do we have enough replicas of the data so that if we lose a few servers, we can still serve our users?
    • Do we have enough copies of different services running such that a fewe failures will not cause a total system shutdown?
    • How to monitor performance of our service?

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文章标题:System Design General Guides - from Grokking SDI

文章字数:533

本文作者:Leilei Chen

发布时间:2020-10-09, 08:55:45

最后更新:2020-10-09, 08:56:11

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