Cracking the System Design Interview: A Step-by-Step Template
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A standardized structure to follow during system design interviews, from clarifying requirements to analyzing bottlenecks.
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The System Design Template
System design interviews evaluate your ability to architect complex services. Follow a strict timeline:
- Clarify Requirements (0-5 mins): Functional (features) and non-functional (scaling, latency, CP vs AP choices).
- Estimations (5-10 mins): Bandwidth, query rates, memory caching sizes.
- High-level Design (10-25 mins): Laying out services, Load balancers, caches, and DB partitions.
- Bottlenecks (25-40 mins): Sharding keys, cache invalidation, single points of failure.
You can brush up on backend scaling terminology in Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling or review data properties in the CAP Theorem.
Step 1: Core Clarifications Cheatsheet
Example
• What is the scale (e.g. 100M active users)? • Read-heavy or write-heavy (e.g. 100:1 read/write ratio)? • What is the acceptable availability (e.g. 99.99%)?
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