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

  1. 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.
  2. Prepare metrics
    • Add metrics, logs, tracing for services.
    • Measure the KPIs of the services.
  3. Present dashboards
    • How to view metrics in tools.
    • Draw dashboard for stakeholders: client, business, developers, operations.
  4. Feedback loops
    • Learn from failures to enhance the metrics and KPIs.

2. Security in System Design

  1. Authenticate & Authorization
    • Who and What they can access.
  2. Detection
    • How to know before this happens ?
    • Predict and pattern-focused.
  3. Protect infrastructure
    • Network.
    • Database.
    • Caching.
    • Server.
    • Physical protection.
    • Because infrastructure always the bottleneck.
  4. Protect data
    • Encrypt/Decrypt data.
    • Backup data.
    • Versioning data.
  5. Learn from unexpected incidents
    • Write docs for unexpected incident happened.
    • Apply RCAs to understand it deeply.
  6. Human process
    • Training humans in the process.
    • Sometime they allow network without the right reasons.

3. Reliability

  1. Accuracy
    • How the accuracy actually are in the service.
  2. Failures
    • How to handle when exception flow happened.
  3. Change management
    • How to change might impact the system ?
  4. Next-step flow management
    • How to predict the next step of the system ?
    • Higher level for change management.

4. Scalability

  1. Latency
    • Average time to complete 1 requests.
  2. Throughput
    • How it handle 10k rps.
  3. Optimize multi-steps
    • Architecture architecture: flow.
    • Service call service
    • Network.
    • Database.
    • Compute.
    • CDN.

5. Cost optimization

  1. Cost Calculator
    • Awareness the cost usage and expenditure.
    • Predict the costs used in the future.
  2. Cost effective usage
    • Use database and RAM for storage.
    • Use number of pods for requests enough.
  3. Dynamic by demand
    • Dynamic resource capacity by traffic.

6. Compliance Alignment

  1. Region segment
    • Split by region.
  2. Infrastructure compliance
    • Data, Network infrastructure compliance.

7. Follow-up Questions

  1. 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 ?
  2. Components Design
    • Client-Server design.
    • Architect
    • API Design.
    • Database Design.
    • Indexing
    • Caching.
    • Load balancing.
    • Sharding.
    • Replicating.
    • Queues.
    • Consistency Model.
    • Storage Object.
  3. Trade-offs
    • What can improves ?
    • What can be faster and slower ?
    • What fails first under load ?
    • What complexity did I introduce ?
  4. 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 ?
  5. 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.
  6. Intention when design
    • Design for time: latency, retries, stale data.
    • Design for failures path, not just success cases.
    • Design for changes (new feature, growth).
  7. Architecture Pillars
    • Reliability
    • Scalability
    • Observability
    • Security
    • Operation
January 5, 2026