systemdesign/concepts
Minimizing System Complexity
Step 1: Clarify Requirements
- Identify functional and non-functional requirements early.
- Avoid designing for unnecessary features.
Modular Design
- Separate components into independent systems.
- Use common services to reduce complexity and improve maintainability:
- Load balancer
- Rate limiting
- Auth (authentication & authorization)
- Logging, monitoring, alerting
- TLS termination
- Caching
- DevOps / CI/CD (if applicable)
Org-Specific Services
- Analytics and machine learning (for orgs collecting user data).
Tradeoffs for Managing Complexity
- High availability & fault-tolerance may require more complexity.
- Consider delayed processing (e.g., ETL pipelines) for non-real-time needs.
- Reduce message size for better latency:
- Use RPC serialization (Avro, Thrift, Protobuf)
- Use Metadata services
Handling Outages
- Plan for outages by:
- Replication
- Failover
- Runbooks