Framework Thinking - System Design Pillars - Template
Here is solutions for template for dive deep system design.
Note: Dive deep for each goals to master.
1. Operation in System Design
- Team scope and shared goal (focus cái này)
- Team goals and alignment services.
- Shared goals
- Understand why the resource are used, process and its responsible and performance.
- Prepare metrics
- Add metrics, logs, tracing for services.
- Measure the KPIs of the services.
- Present dashboards
- How to view metrics in tools.
- Draw dashboard for stakeholders: client, business, developers, operations.
- Feedback loops
- Learn from failures to enhance the metrics and KPIs.
2. Security in System Design
- Authenticate & Authorization
- Who and What they can access.
- Detection
- How to know before this happens ?
- Predict and pattern-focused.
- Protect infrastructure
- Network.
- Database.
- Caching.
- Server.
- Physical protection.
- Because infrastructure always the bottleneck.
- Protect data
- Encrypt/Decrypt data.
- Backup data.
- Versioning data.
- Learn from unexpected incidents
- Write docs for unexpected incident happened.
- Apply RCAs to understand it deeply.
- Human process
- Training humans in the process.
- Sometime they allow network without the right reasons.
3. Reliability
- Accuracy
- How the accuracy actually are in the service.
- Failures
- How to handle when exception flow happened.
- Change management
- How to change might impact the system ?
- Next-step flow management
- How to predict the next step of the system ?
- Higher level for change management.
4. Scalability
- Latency
- Average time to complete 1 requests.
- Throughput
- How it handle 10k rps.
- Optimize multi-steps
- Architecture architecture: flow.
- Service call service
- Network.
- Database.
- Compute.
- CDN.
5. Cost optimization
- Cost Calculator
- Awareness the cost usage and expenditure.
- Predict the costs used in the future.
- Cost effective usage
- Use database and RAM for storage.
- Use number of pods for requests enough.
- Dynamic by demand
- Dynamic resource capacity by traffic.
6. Compliance Alignment
- Region segment
- Split by region.
- Infrastructure compliance
- Data, Network infrastructure compliance.
7. Follow-up Questions
- Requirements
- What are the users ?
- What the parts required read-heavy, write-heavy and both ?
- What must be fast, which can be slow ?
- What must never break ?
- What must be consistency, what can be eventually consistency ?
- Components Design
- Client-Server design.
- Architect
- API Design.
- Database Design.
- Indexing
- Caching.
- Load balancing.
- Sharding.
- Replicating.
- Queues.
- Consistency Model.
- Storage Object.
- Trade-offs
- What can improves ?
- What can be faster and slower ?
- What fails first under load ?
- What complexity did I introduce ?
- Think twice about system design
- How the data stored ?
- How do read scale ?
- How do write scale ?
- What happened in traffic spike ?
- What happened when one components failed ?
- Where is the bottleneck ?
- Advanced concepts
- Distributed system.
- CAP theorem.
- Consistency and Availability.
- Leader-follower and multi-leader.
- Partitioning strategies.
- Rate limiting & Backpressure.
- Idempotency & Retries.
- Event-driven system.
- Data pipelines.
- Caching strategies.
- Observability: Logging, Monitoring, Tracing.
- Intention when design
- Design for time: latency, retries, stale data.
- Design for failures path, not just success cases.
- Design for changes (new feature, growth).
- Architecture Pillars
- Reliability
- Scalability
- Observability
- Security
- Operation
January 5, 2026