System Design Overview

What this topic covers

System design is about planning how software behaves when real users, real traffic, and real failures show up. A good starting point is learning how requests move through a system and where bottlenecks usually appear.

Revision checkpoints

• Think in terms of users, traffic, latency, and reliability.
• Break a system into smaller parts like clients, servers, databases, and queues.
• Ask what happens when traffic grows or a dependency fails.

client -> load balancer -> app servers -> database

What to remember

You do not need to design everything at once. Start with a simple version, then add scale and fault tolerance step by step.