Cracking System Design Interview - Mind Map

Cracking System Design Interview

Define Functional Requirements

Summarise functional requirements you are able to understand

Suggest other functional requirements you can think are important

Very Important, as this gives interviewer an idea that you can extend a requirement

Ask if there specific functional requirement interviewer is interested in?

Confirming things are very good, it makes interviewer feels part of the problem and indicates your collaborative behaviour

Prioritise: Suggest priority of requirements according to you and confirm if interviewer agrees with it

Again very important, as this gives interviewer an idea that you can set priority of your tasks.

Note: Confirmation

Define Non Functional Requirements

Latency

Latency requirements for Read requests

Latency requirements for write requests

High Availability

Yes

No

Consistency

Strict?

Eventual?

Scalability

Ask if there are any specific non functional requirement interviewer wants to cover?

Recoverability

Maintainability

Reliability

Define Extended Requirements

Analytics

Monitoring

Alerting

Ask if there are any other extended requirements interviewer have in his head?

Like I told you earlier, don't forget to ask :)

Define Workflows

Write workflow for all important functionalities

Think in terms of user using your application to define your workflows.

No need to define application components/microservices at this stage

Write down basic workflows of background processes

Think about major background processes you may need

Generate Capacity Estimates

Traffic Estimates

Ask for total users expected?

Ask for total Read Requests?

Ask for total Write Requests?

Derive Storage Estimates

Derive Bandwidth Estimates

Derive Cache Memory Estimates

Consider which data you will cache

Consider how much data you will keep in cache

Ask interviewer first if he/she needs this, or tell him/her that we can do this estimation at end

Define System APIs

Define major system APIs

Operation Name

Input Parameters

Output Parameters

If RESTful API then define GET, PUT, POST, DELETE or PATCH

Define major components

Different components or Microservices

Follow your workflow and think about different services/components which are required

Consider which component will have which type of database and do remember CAP theorem

Distributed DB

RDBMS

Search specific datastore

Add caches above DB wherever required

Remember you do not have to put cache over all DB.

You can always ask interviewer that you will add cache components at the end

Consider how different components will interact

via REST API

via Messaging Bus

via Websockets

via Messaging bus

Extend your design

API Gateway

Load balancer

CDN

Circuit Breaker

Request Throttling

State machine or
Workflow system

Cache Eviction

Database details

Schema

Partitioning/Sharding with type

Replication

Archival/Purging Policy

Extended Requirement

How Analytics will be generated?

From Live analytics

From Historic data

Log storage

Dashboards

Alerts

Fraud detection system

Security and Permissions

User Historic data system

Auditing system

Data reconciliation system

Everything Else

Deployment

Containers

Kubernetes

Service Mesh

How many environments required?

Dev

UAT

Pre Prod

Production

Prod Parallel

CICD

Testcases

Unit Testcases

Functional Testcases

Integration Testcases

Code Quality

Branching Strategy

Sonar Integration

Code Reviews

Created By

Rakesh Kalra

Klik her, for at centrere dit kort.
Klik her, for at centrere dit kort.