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System Design Deep Dive: Real-World Distributed Systems

Conclusion

Explore the key takeaways from this advanced system design course. Understand the difference between knowing concepts and applying them to real-world systems with balanced trade-offs. Learn strategies to continue your education, including leveraging cloud provider systems and monitoring major conferences to stay current with distributed system innovations.

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Congratulations on completing this challenging course! We hope you appreciate that knowing the system design concept is one thing, while picking the right one for the job and making a full-fledged system is a level-up. We carefully picked design problems that covered many design trade-offs and criteria to balance such trade-offs. We hope you have acquired new knowledge while reinforcing your earlier concepts.

Next steps

We recommend a few things to continue your learning journey.

First, designing a system right is important, but implementing (or using) a large distributed system has its challenges. Most systems provided by large cloud providers are examples of large-scale distributed systems. We can strategically use them to reinforce our systems concepts. For example, most cloud providers have a range of databases (from traditional relational databases to different kinds of NoSQL databases). We can devise an experiment to compare the read/write performance of RDBMS and a column-family database to see the performance benefits of a workload of our choice.

Second, many large organizations reveal their innovations in their systems at a handful of conferences. If you’d like to be among the first to know about these innovations, you can monitor the following conferences. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list.

  • ACM's Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)

  • USENIX's Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 22, OSDI 23)

  • USENIX's Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI, NSDI 22, NSDI 23)

  • USENIX's Annual Technical Conference (ATC)

  • ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communication Conference (SIGCOMM)

  • ACM's Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)

We regularly monitor innovations in system design and will add content to this course over time.

Happy learning, and build great systems!