System Design on AWS

Chapter 1. System Design Trade-offs and Guidelines

Today’s modern technological revolution is happening because of large-scale software systems. Big enterprise companies like Google, Amazon, Oracle, and SAP have all built large-scale software systems to run their (and their customers’) businesses. Building and operating such large-scale software systems requires first-principles thinking to design and develop the technical architecture before actually putting the system into code. This is because we don’t want to be in a state where these systems will not work or scale as more users need them.

If the design is right in the first place, the rest of the implementation journey becomes smooth. This requires looking at the business requirements, understanding the needs and objectives of the customer, evaluating different trade-offs, thinking about error handling and edge cases, and contemplating future changes and robustness while worrying about basic details like algorithms and data structures. Enterprises can avoid the mistake of wasted software-development effort by carefully thinking about systems and investing time in understanding bottlenecks, system requirements, users being targeted, user access patterns, and many such decisions, which, in short, is system design.

This chapter covers the basics of system design with the goal of helping you understand the fundamental concepts, the trade-offs that naturally arise in such large-scale software systems, the fallacies to avoid in ...