System Design Cheat Sheet [verified] (HIGH-QUALITY)

Before choosing a tech stack, define the system's boundaries and expectations.

| Model | Behavior | Latency | Data loss risk | |-------|----------|---------|----------------| | | All reads see latest write | Higher | None (if quorum) | | Eventual | Reads may be stale, converge over time | Lower | Possible during failover | | Read-your-writes | Session sees own writes | Medium | None | | Monotonic reads | Reads never go back in time | Medium | None |

→ APIs, data flow Non-functional → Availability, latency, durability, consistency system design cheat sheet

Keep this sheet handy during design interviews or architecture reviews. Adapt — there is no perfect design, only trade-offs you can justify.

| Characteristic | What it means | How to achieve | |----------------|---------------|----------------| | | System stays up | Redundancy, failover, replication | | Consistency | All nodes see same data | Quorums, transactions, locks | | Partition Tolerance | Works despite network splits | Distributed architecture (CAP theorem) | | Scalability | Handle more load | Horizontal scaling, sharding, caching | | Latency | Response time | Caching, CDN, efficient indexes | | Throughput | Requests/second | Parallelism, async processing, batching | | Durability | Data persists after failure | Replication, WAL, backups | Before choosing a tech stack, define the system's

LRU, LFU, TTL, FIFO.

System Design Cheatsheet. System Design.md. System Design Cheatsheet. Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + | Characteristic | What it means | How

Identify functional requirements (what the system does) and non-functional requirements (how it performs, such as 99.99% uptime).