System Designer

📐 Back of the Envelope

Master system design calculations, reference numbers, and estimation techniques

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Quick References
4
New Comparisons
5
Categories
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Performance & Capacity

Numbers every system designer should know

Rules of Thumb
Capacity, tail latency, and back-of-the-envelope math
Latency Numbers
CPU, memory, storage, datacenter, and WAN baselines
Full Request Path
Budgeted end-to-end request breakdowns
🌐

Infrastructure & Networking

Core infrastructure patterns and protocols

Infrastructure
DNS, TLS 1.3, load balancing, gateways, queues
CDN & Network
Caching semantics, Anycast, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3/QUIC
New
API Patterns
REST, GraphQL, gRPC comparison and best practices
New
Rate Limiting
Algorithms, distributed challenges, and Redis implementations
🗄️

Data & Storage

Database selection, caching, and data patterns

Data Sizes
Primitives, objects, and real-world payloads
1MB Transfer
BDP math and realistic transfer times
SQL vs NoSQL
Database selection matrix and performance benchmarks
New
Database Sharding
Horizontal partitioning strategies and trade-offs
🏗️

Architecture & Messaging

System architecture and communication patterns

Load Balancing
Algorithms, health checks, and capacity planning
Caching Strategies
Cache patterns, hit rates, and invalidation
Message Queues
Throughput benchmarks and delivery guarantees
CAP Theorem
Consistency, availability, and partition tolerance trade-offs
☁️

Cloud & Deployment

Cloud platforms, containers, and deployment strategies

New
Cloud Comparison
AWS vs Azure vs GCP services and pricing

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