Concept Explanation In system design, trade-offs represent the inevitable compromises between competing system attributes that must be balanced to meet specific requirements. Two fundamental trade-offs are latency versus throughput and consistency versus performance, each influencing how systems handle load, data…

Concept Explanation Vertical and horizontal scaling are two fundamental approaches to enhancing a system’s capacity to handle increased load, such as higher user traffic, data volume, or computational demands. These strategies are integral to system design, enabling architects to ensure…

Concept Explanation Availability, in the context of system design, refers to the measure of a system’s uptime—the percentage of time it remains operational and accessible to perform its intended functions under normal or anticipated conditions. It is a critical metric…

Concept Explanation Scalability, within the realm of system design, denotes the ability of a system to accommodate an increase in demand—such as a surge in user traffic, transaction volume, or data processing requirements—while maintaining acceptable levels of performance, reliability, and…

Software architecture patterns provide proven blueprints for structuring applications, guiding developers in building scalable, maintainable, and efficient systems. These patterns address common challenges in design, such as modularity, performance, and extensibility. This in-depth exploration examines nine essential patterns, including layered,…

Introduction Concurrency and parallelism are fundamental concepts in system design that address how tasks are executed within software and hardware environments. While often used interchangeably, they represent distinct approaches to managing multiple operations, with significant implications for performance, scalability, and…

Introduction Stateful and stateless architectures represent two distinct paradigms in system design, each with significant implications for scalability, complexity, and operational efficiency. Stateful architecture maintains client session data or application state on the server, while stateless architecture treats each request…

Introduction Client-server architecture is a foundational model in distributed computing, underpinning the design of modern software systems, including web applications, enterprise solutions, and networked services. This architecture delineates the roles of clients and servers, where clients initiate requests, and servers…

Introduction Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are fundamental building blocks in modern software architecture, serving as the conduits for communication between different system components. In the context of system design interviews, understanding APIs is essential, as they often form the backbone…