Fundamentals

Lessons in this group, roughly in build order:

• what-is-system-design-how-to-approach-it — System design is the discipline of turning fuzzy product requirements into a concrete architecture of…
• performance-vs-scalability — Performance is how fast the system is for one unit of work; scalability is whether it stays fast as load…
• latency-vs-throughput — Latency is the time for one request to complete; throughput is how many requests complete per unit time —…
• availability-vs-consistency-cap-theorem — CAP states that a distributed store facing a network partition (P) must choose between consistency (C) and…
• consistency-patterns-weak-eventual-strong — Consistency models define what a read may return after a write — a spectrum from “no guarantee” (weak)…
• availability-patterns-failover-replication — Availability patterns keep a service answering despite component failure, mainly through replication (more…
• availability-in-numbers-the-nines — Availability is quantified as a percentage of uptime — the “nines” — where each extra nine cuts allowed…