System Design Template

• Requirements
  • Functional Requirements
    • What do we want to achieve?
  • Non-Functional Requirements
    • Scale, qps
    • Read heavy or write heavy
    • availability? or consistency?
    • security?
• Come up with high-level design
  • Finish the functionality
  • Consider if async producer-consumer pattern is necessary (like introducing message queues)
• Identify the single failure point
  • Consider adding horizontal scaling tricks, load balance with multiple servers, database sharding and replicates
  • add cache, consider CDN
  • consider hotspot, some area has more requests than others etc.