Core System Design Concepts — System Design Roadmap
The foundational vocabulary and mental models used throughout system design
Steps in Core System Design Concepts
- Client-Server Architecture — beginner · The basic client-server model and how it extends into multi-tier architectures
- Scalability Basics (Vertical vs Horizontal) — beginner · Scaling up (bigger machines) vs scaling out (more machines) and their trade-offs
- Availability & Reliability Basics — beginner · Uptime, redundancy, single points of failure and the 'nines' of availability
- Performance Metrics (Latency, Throughput, P99) — beginner · Reading percentile latencies, QPS and why averages hide problems
- Back-of-the-Envelope Capacity Estimation — beginner · Estimating QPS, storage and bandwidth needs from rough usage assumptions
Part of
- System Design roadmap — the full learning path