Essential Strategies for Designing Scalable Systems

Importance of proactive problem solving in scalability.

Overview of eight design challenges faced by growing systems.

Scenario of a popular news website with many reads but few writes.

Solution: Implementing a caching layer to reduce database load.

Challenges include cache synchronization and expiration management.

Need for different optimization strategies for write-heavy systems.

Use of asynchronous writes with message queues.

Utilizing LSM-Tree databases like Cassandra for efficient writing.

Importance of redundancy and failover in database management.

Strategies include synchronous/asynchronous replication and quorum-based replication.

Combining load balancing with database replication for enhanced availability.

Primary-replica setups and their roles.

Use of CDNs to cache content closer to users to reduce latency.

Dynamic content management with edge computing.

Types of storage: block storage for databases and object storage for large files.

Strategy of combining both storage types for efficiency.

Utilization of tools like Prometheus for logging and metrics.

Importance of distributed tracing tools for debugging.

Using indexing to improve database query performance.

Potential need for sharding as a scalability solution.