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Grokking Modern System Design Interview

High-Level Design of a Distributed Cache

Design the architecture for a highly scalable distributed cache system. Define essential functional and non-functional requirements like high performance, consistency, and availability. Explore critical design choices, including storage hardware, eviction policies, and the roles of cache clients and servers in the high-level System Design.

We'll cover the following...

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  • <a href=”#Requirements" aria-label=“Read more about Requirements” >Requirements
    • <a href="#Functional" aria-label=“Read more about Functional” >Functional
    • <a href="#Non-functional-requirements" aria-label=“Read more about Non-functional requirements” >Non-functional requirements
  • <a href="#API-design" aria-label=“Read more about API design” >API design
    • <a href="#Insertion" aria-label=“Read more about Insertion” >Insertion
    • <a href="#Retrieval" aria-label=“Read more about Retrieval” >Retrieval
  • <a href="#Design-considerations" aria-label=“Read more about Design considerations” >Design considerations
    • <a href="#Storage-hardware" aria-label=“Read more about Storage hardware” >Storage hardware
    • <a href="#Data-structures" aria-label=“Read more about Data structures” >Data structures
    • <a href="#Cache-client" aria-label=“Read more about Cache client” >Cache client
    • <a href="#Writing-policy" aria-label=“Read more about Writing policy” >Writing policy
    • <a href="#Eviction-policy" aria-label=“Read more about Eviction policy” >Eviction policy
  • <a href="#High-level-design" aria-label=“Read more about High-level design” >High-level design
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In this lesson, we will design a distributed cache. We will also discuss the trade-offs and design choices involved in developing the solution.

Requirements

Let’s start by defining the requirements.

Functional

The system must support the following operations:

  • Insert data: Users must be able to add an entry to the cache.

  • Retrieve data: Users must be able to retrieve data associated with a specific key.

Functional and non-functional requirements of a distributed cache
Functional and non-functional requirements of a distributed cache

Non-functional requirements

We must meet the following non-functional requirements:

  • High performance: The primary goal is fast data retrieval. Both insert and retrieve operations must be low-latency.

  • Scalability: The system should scale horizontally to handle increasing request loads without ...