Introduction to Building Blocks for Modern System Design

The bottom-up approach for modern system design

System design problems usually have some similarities, though specific details are often unique. We have extracted these similarities across design problems as the basic building blocks we’ll be covering. One example of a building block is a load-balancing component, which we’ll probably use in every design problem in one way or the other.

The purpose of separating the building blocks is to thoroughly discuss their design just once. This means that later we can use them anywhere without having to go over them in detail again. We can think about building blocks as bricks to construct more effective, capable systems.

Many of the building blocks we discuss are also available for actual use in the public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We can use such constructs to build a system to further cement our understanding. (We won’t construct the system in this course, but we’ve left it as an exercise for interested learners.)