Starting from Alex Xu (book), a 4-step process for effective system design would be great !
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 !
On this page:
Step 3 : Design deep dive
After the step 2 and be agreed on the overall goals.
Focus on deep dive based on the feedback
- We can identify and prioritize components in the architecture; if possible, we could focus on the bottlenecks and resource estimations ("Back-of-the-envelope calculation").