System Design Interview 1-Pagers

A list of core system design topics with the objective of it being maximally useful for your next system design interview.

100+ users preparing their interviews have downloaded this guide.

• Concise 1-page summary on each topic. The purpose is to share an overview of each topic without it being overwhelming (either for beginners or as a cheat-sheet post your interview preparations)
• Optimized for system design interviews. There are already a number of great resources out there where you can learn system design principles. This reference optimizes those topics to be specifically helpful for system design interview. Each topic has these following sub sections:

1. Trade-offs, caveats and alternatives. In designing systems, everything is a tradeoff. You need to understand and mention the caveats of the component you are willing to add as it will require resources to build and maintain.

2. Use it for… It’s one thing to know the topic, but for you it’s important to know where you can use that knowledge during the interview. This part shows when and how you can utilize that topic during a system design interview.

3. ++. Remember this is an “interview”, not a discussion. The interviewer is marking [+] and [-] checkpoints for each thing you say. It’s helpful to add a few interesting points during the interview that other interviewees might not have mentioned to get that extra [++] points. This section is where you can get some extra in depth information about a topic. Obviously, going in depth on a 1-pager is contradictory, so I’ve linked further reading links that can help you add more to your arsenal.

Here are the full list of sections you will get in this reference. Best of luck with your interviews!

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Overview
CAP Theorem
Domain Name Service (DNS)
Consistent Hashing
Scaling
  - Load Balancing
  - Reverse Proxy
  - CDN
  - Caching
Database
  - RDBMS
  - NoSQL
Event-based architecture
  - Messaging
  - Streaming & Batch processing
Communication Protocols
Appendix