Blog URL: https://cheatsheet.dennyzhang.

com/cheatsheet-systemdesign-A4 Updated: February 24, 2020

1 CheatSheet: System Design For Job Interview Interview

• PDF Link: cheatsheet-systemdesign-A4.pdf, Category: interview
• Blog URL: https://cheatsheet.dennyzhang.com/cheatsheet-systemdesign-A4
• Related posts: CheatSheet: Leetcode For Code Interview, CheatSheet: Well-Known Papers For IT Industry,
#denny-cheatsheets

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1.1 Reference

Name Summary
YouTube YouTube: Intro to Architecture and Systems Design Interviews, YouTube: System Design Interview
YouTube YouTube Channel: Success in Tech, YouTube: Scalability Harvard Web Development
Papers CheatSheet: Well-Known Papers For IT Industry, Github: papers-we-love
Github Github: system-design-primer, Github: puncsky/system-design-and-architecture
Website Website: hiredintech - System Design, Website: blog.gainlo.co
Website Website: interviewing.io, Website: interviewbit.com
Cheatsheet CheatSheet: Leetcode For Code Interview, CheatSheet: Common Code Problems & Follow-ups
Cheatsheet CheatSheet: System Design For Job Interview, CheatSheet: SRE/DevOps/Sysadmin
Cheatsheet CheatSheet: Behavior Questions For Coder Interview, Programming Language Implemenetations CheatSh
Cheatsheet CheatSheet: Concurrency & Parallel Programming
Coding Code problems for #oodesign
Company Tech Blog Website: Facebook Engineering, Website: Google Developers
Company Tech Blog Medium: Netflix Blog, Medium: Airbnb Engineering & Data Science
Company Tech Blog Shopify Engineering, Github Engineering
Individual Tech Blog Blog: All Things Distributed - Amazon CTO, Blog: highscalability
Reference Link: Facebook Engineering Interview, Link: The System Design Process

1.2 Design Problems Per Category

Num Name Summary

1 K/V DB store Design K/V DB; Design memcache/redis
2 Data synchronization Design dropbox client sync
3 Resource/Task scheduling Design web crawler; Delayed task queue; Design a distributed message queue
4 Design a distributed component Design a distributed hit counter, Design a distributed UUID generator
5 Design a SNS system Design Twitter News Feed
6 Design API Gateway Design An API Rate Limiter
7 Design a logging & metrics system Pull vs Push model
8 Design a gaming system Design: Leaderboard Ranking
9 Design a small scale MIS system Design: Flight booking service, Design a payment processor
10 Recommendation system Design amazon book recommendation system
11 Design a communication system Design a message chat room
12 Design an ads system

1.3 Top 30 Component Design

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Num Name Summary

1 Top K Frequent Elements in Recent X mins Github: link
2 Design An API Rate Limiter
3 Design: Leaderboard Ranking
4 Delayed task queue
5 Web crawler
6 Design online/offline status system
7 How to deployment 1GB binary to 10,000 servers Github: link
8 Merge big datasets across different servers Github: link
9 Design a monitoring system to check 10,000 nodes Github: link
10 Unique url hits
11 Design a distributed counter
12 Design a distributed message queue
13 Design a distributed cache service
14 Design a distributed Hashmap
15 Design a distributed UUID generator
16 Design: A Parking Lot Service
17 Design a distributed transaction
18 Design: A URL Redirecting Feature
19 Give three 1TB disks, how to store 2TB data with redundancy Github: link. XOR bit manipulation
20 How to support feature of "diff big1.bin big2.bin" #lcs - Longest Common Subsequence
21 How to support "rsync big1.bin ssh:/big2.bin" in a doggy network delta-transfer algorithm. Weak Hashing + Strong Ha
22 Avoid double payment in a distributed payment system Link: Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Pa

1.4 Concurrency Problems

• CheatSheet: Concurrency & Parallel Programming

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1.5 Top 30 Product Design

Num Name
1 Design: TinyURL - A URL Shorterner Service
2 Design Twitter News Feed
3 Design K/V DB
4 Design autocomplete/typeahead
5 Design a online contest system like leetcode.com
6 Design Google Calendar
7 Design a load balancer
8 Design: Flight booking service
9 Design: Uber Backend
10 Design: An Elevator Service
11 Design amazon shopping cart
12 Design: Google Suggestion Service
13 Design a payment processor
14 Design google doc
15 Design gmail
16 Design RSS news reader
17 Design a client-server API to build a rich document editor
18 Design instagram, a photo sharing app
19 Design Yelp, a location-based system
20 Design Pastebin.com
21 Design amazon book recommendation system
22 Design Google PageRank
23 Design messaging/notification system
24 Design memcache/redis
25 Design a voice conference system
26 Design an API gateway
27 Design slack
28 Design a service auto-discovery feature
29 Design a secrets management system
30 Design Google Adsense fraud detection
31 Design The Great Firewall

1.6 Process Of System Design

Num Name Summary

1 Outline use cases: List major and focus on some Show good sense. The questions you asked define your level
2 Estimate scale: Data + Traffic Back-of-the-envelope estimation
3 Defining data model It helps to clarify how data will flow among different components
4 Abstract design Sketch main components, explain workflow, avoid too deep for details
5 Detailed design + discussion with interviewers Explain trade-off of your proposal + on-demand deep dive
6 Identify and resolve Bottlenecks Key challenges + Trade-Offs. Usuaully no optimal solution(s)
7 Scale your design Availability, Resiliency, Scalability, Security, Serviceability, etc
8 Show your relevant experience and learning Industry best practice; You experience of scaling/trade-off/resiliency

1.7 Common Mistakes Of System Design

Num Name Summary
1 Run into an opinioned solutions before clarification Inexperienced; Hard to communicate
2 Not driving the conversation Inexperienced
3 General answers without your personal experience/thinking
4 Makes interviewers feeling you’re stubborn

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1.8 Top 30 Concepts For Feature/System Design

Num Name Summary
1 Caching Stores data so that future requests of data retrieval can be faster
2 Message Queue Provides an asynchronous communications protocol,
3 Data Partition & Sharding Break up a big data volume into many smaller parts
4 DB Indexing Create indexes on multiple columns to speed up table look up
5 DB replication Duplicate data to increase service availability
6 CAP: Consistency/Availability/Partition A distributed database system can only have 2 of the 3
7 DB: SQL & NoSQL Relational databases and non-relational databases
8 Concurrency & Communication
9 Pessimistic And Optimistic Locking
10 Consistency Module weak consistency, eventual consistency, strong consistency
11 Conflict resolution Quorum, vector lock, reconcile on read/write, CRDTs
12 B+ Tree
13 Networking: HTTP
14 Networking: TCP/UDP
15 Pull vs Push model
16 Garbage Collection
17 Memory Management
18 Heartbeats
19 Self Protection API Rate limit, Circuit breaker, bulkhead, throttling
20 Filesystem
21 API: RPC vs gRPC vs REST
22 Load balancer
23 Scale up vs Scale out Vertical scaling and Horizontal scaling
24 API Design
25 Session management
26 Networking: TCP vs UDP
27 Consistency patterns Weak consistency, Eventual consistency, Strong consistency
28 Availability patterns Fail-over vs Replication
29 CDN - Content Delivery Network Edge caching
30 Monitoring
31 Security
32 Networking: DNS
33 Linux signals

1.9 Top 15 Advanced Data Structure & Algorithms

Num Name Summary

1 Consistent Hash
2 Bloom filter A space-effcient query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not"
3 hyerloglog for count-distinct problem Estimation: the count of unique values with relatively high accuracy(98%
4 CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types)
5 SSTable (Sorted Strings Table)
6 LSM (Log Structured Merge Trees)
7 Gossip Propagate cluster status
8 Two-phase commit/Three-phase commit
9 Vector Clocks/Version Vectors
10 Paxos and raft protocol
11 Merkle Tree
12 Ring buffer
13 Frugal Streaming

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dennyzhang/cheatsheet.dennyzhang.com/master/cheatsheet-systemdesign-A4/dynamo-
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1.10 Explain workflow: What happens when XXX?

Num Name Summary

1 When happens when I search in google?
2 How loadbalancer works
3 Explain three phase commit model
4 Explain HTTP return code Link: Series of posts on HTTP status codes e.g, 401 vs 405, 500 vs 503 vs 504
5 Explain Mysql DB replication model
6 Explain gossip protocol
7 Explain CAP
8 Explain Hadoop file system
9 [Linux] Explain OS booting process

1.11 Explain tools: how XXX supports XXX?

Num Name Summary
1 How JDK implement hashmap?
2 Explain java garbage collection model
3 Explain raft/etcd
4 How OS supports XXX?

1.12 Cloud Design Principles

Num Name Summary
1 Fail fast
2 Design for failure
3 Immutable infrastructure
4 Cats vs Cattle Avoid snowflake servers
5 Auto healing
6 Async programming
7 GitOps operational model
8 Event-Driven Architectures

1.13 Cloud Design Patterns

Num Name Summary
1 Ambassador pattern Create helper service to send network requests, besides the main sevice
2 Cache-Aside pattern Load data on demand into a cache from a data store
3 Circuit Breaker pattern If a request takes too many reousrce, abort it
4 Bulkhead pattern Isolate elements into pools, so that one fire won’t burn all
5 Gateway Aggregation pattern Aggregate multiple individual requests into a single request
6 Priority Queue pattern Support different SLAs for different individual clients
7 Strangler pattern Incrementally migrate a legacy system piece by piece

1.14 Engineering Of Well-Known Products

Name Summary
Google Link: Google Architecture
Facebook Link: Facebook Live Streams
Twitter Link: Twitter Image Service, YouTube: Timelines at Scale
Uber Link: Lessons Learned From Scaling Uber
Tumblr Link: Tumblr Architecture
StackOverflow Link: Stack Overflow Architecture

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1.15 Grow Design Expertise In Daily Work

Num Name Summary
1 Keep the curiosity Thinking about interesting/weird questions helps
2 Deep dive into your daily work Unify and normalize problems from daily work
3 Learn the work of your coleagues Indirect working experience also help
4 Popular products under the hood Once you notice an interesting feature, think about how it’s supported?
5 Read engineering blogs Especially for big companies
6 Tools under the hood Common tools/frameworks
7 Try tools Use cases; Alternatives; Pros and Cons
8 Read papers Best practices in papers
9 Try new things Gain hands-on experience; evaluate alternatives
10 Datastore & OS Learn how databases and operating systems work
11 Language implementation Deep dive into one programming language. Java, Python, Golang, etc

1.16 More Resources

License: Code is licensed under MIT License.
https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability
https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
https://github.com/checkcheckzz/system-design-interview
https://github.com/binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/
https://github.com/sdmg15/Best-websites-a-programmer-should-visit

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