snake – system design principles to crack a system design in 5 steps

Here are 5 steps to crack any system design questions in general.

1. Scenario: case/interface

   • What are the typical use cases?
   • What kind of abstraction do you provide?
   • What do the APIs look like?

2. Necessary: constrain/hypothesis

   • How many total users and daily active users do you have?
   • How many transactions do you have?
   • How many concurrencies or parallel executions does it require?
   • How much is the peak load?
   • How fast does it have to be? Or how much latency can it endure

3. Application: service/algorithm

   • Complexity and Big O analysis

4. Kilobit: data

   • How much is the generated data
   • How much space does it need to persist
   • Where to store the data. File system? SQL database? NoSQL database?

5. Evolve:

   • Optimization
   • Extensibility
   • Scalability
   • Availability