Conclusions
Review what you’ve learned in this course.
We'll cover the following...
Before we conclude, we’d like to congratulate you for completing such a challenging course!
In this course, we learned system design activity from the lens of basic building blocks—the fundamental subsystems that combine to make a bigger system. Doing so enabled us to focus on the specific business use cases instead of repeating the recurring concepts.
We carefully selected our design problems from many different domains, and we've made an explicit effort to incorporate some unique aspects or issues of system design activity in each of them.
Unique Aspects of Each Design Problem
Design Problem | Unique Aspect of Design |
YouTube | Building custom data stores like Vitess and BigTable to meet scalability needs |
Quora | Vertical sharding of MySQL database to meet the scalability requirements |
Google Maps | The use of segmentation of a map to meet scalability needs and achieve high performance |
Yelp | Usage of Quadtrees for speedy access to spatial data |
Uber | Improved payment service to ensure fraud detection, and matching the driver and rider on maps |
The use of client-side load balancers for multiple services that had thousands of instances in order to reduce latency | |
Newsfeed | A recommendation system to ensure ranking and feed suggestions |
A perfect example of how different building blocks combine to build a scalable and performant system | |
TinyURL | Encoding IDs in the base-58 system for generating unique short URLs |
Web crawler | Detection, identification, and resolution of Web crawler traps |
Message management for offline users | |
Typeahead | The usage of an efficient trie data structure to provide suggestions |
Google Docs | Concurrency management for simultaneous writes, using techniques like operational transformation (OT) and Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) |
Deployment System | Blue-green, canary, and rolling deployment strategies to achieve zero-downtime releases and minimize blast radius. |
Payment System | Strong consistency and reconciliation layers to guarantee reliable, fraud-free financial transactions. |
ChatGPT System | Large-scale model inference and retrieval integration using distributed GPU clusters for low-latency responses. |
At this point, we’ve built our system design toolbox, and we can now pick the right tools for the job at hand. We hope that this course has helped you gain enough knowledge to design new problems and solutions using our building blocks. Let’s put our System Design knowledge to work and build great systems!
Next steps
To expand your skill set, we recommend taking the following three courses:
Grokking the Generative AI System Design: This course provides a comprehensive framework for designing scalable machine learning systems. You’ll learn how to identify and handle various challenges, from data acquisition and resource estimations to model training and deployment.
Grokking the Principles and Practices of Advanced System Design: Targeted for senior roles, this course elevates your system design skills by addressing complex problems such as consensus algorithms, storage systems, file systems, concurrency management, etc.
Grokking the Product Architecture Design Interview: Product architecture design is essential to ensure that the services you build can effectively communicate with other systems. Mastering API design principles is critical for creating reliable and compatible APIs that support modern software architectures.
We also recommend testing your skills by taking a Mock Interviewer.
Finally, we would like to thank you for taking the time to complete this course! We hope you had a great experience. Please feel free to drop us an email or leave a comment on our community forum about any suggestions that you may have.
— Team Educative