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Step 1 : Understand the problem and establish the design scope

• Understand the context and the constraints : ask questions to establish the type of constraints (technological, infra, etc.).
• What specific features we are going to build ?
• How many users does the product have ? How many users do we expect in the future ?
• How fast the company anticipate to scale up ? 3 months, 6 months and 1 year ?
• What is the company's technology stack ? What is the technological legacy ? What existing services we might leverage to simplify the design ?

Example of questions : What is the traffic volume ? What is the expected traffic volume after a time X ? etc.

Step 2 : Establish a high-level design 

• Establish an initial blueprint for the design according the step 1 : for example, is the organization going hybrid in the first step ?
• Draw the design with key components :
  • client layer (mobile/web, etc...), APIs, Web servers, data store, cache, CDN, message queue, etc.
• Estimate the system capacity or performance requirements (See the page "Back-of-the-envelope calculation").

If possible, go through a few concrete use cases says Alex Xu !