Thoughts on what to discuss at each stage

Step 1: narrow the scope

• Scale: how many users / traffic

• Security / Authentication: is this already in place?

• Data size: e.g. handling videos is different to images vs small data like credit card transactions

Step 2: Design

Images from https://bytebytego.com/courses/system-design-interview/a-framework-for-system-design-interviews

• Sketch out the infrastructure layer to buy you time to think

  

• Then the bit underneath is probably the “real” systems design for a backend dev

• Typically it’s some service that talks to some DB and/or Cache

• Considerations:

  • Webjobs

    • Scheduled / triggered

    • Rate limiting

  • Database

    • Relational (SQL) / non-relational (Cosmos)

    • Normalised / denormalised

    • Locking vs not