System Design

12-21-2025

A map of large-scale system design concepts, organized by topic for study and interview prep. Most links below are stubs to fill in during the deep dive.

Fundamentals

  • Scalability
  • Latency and Throughput
  • Availability and Reliability
  • CAP Theorem
  • Consistency Models

Networking and Communication

  • DNS
  • Load Balancing
  • Reverse Proxy
  • API Gateway
  • Communication Protocols

Data Storage

Databases

  • SQL vs NoSQL
  • Database Indexing
  • Database Replication
  • Sharding and Partitioning

Performance

  • Caching
  • Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Asynchronous Processing

  • Message Queues
  • Publish-Subscribe
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • Stream Processing

Distributed Systems

  • Consensus Algorithms
  • Leader Election
  • Consistent Hashing
  • Distributed Transactions
  • Idempotency

Architecture Patterns

  • Microservices
  • Rate Limiting
  • Circuit Breaker

The Cloud