Introduction to System Design

System design

System design is the process of creating components of a system, including its architecture, modules, and components, as well as its various interfaces and the data it processes. System design is the process of establishing a system's architecture, components, interfaces, and data to meet predetermined criteria. It is a multidisciplinary field that involves trade-off analysis, balancing competing needs, and making choices concerning design elements that will influence the system as a whole. In order words:

System Design === Architecture + Data + Components

Why is system design important

The goal of system design is to offer enough precise data and knowledge about the system and its system pieces to allow implementation compatible with architectural entities described in system architecture models and views. System designs have a few things in common:

1. Dependability: This refers to the level of reliability, robustness and impact rates of the smaller systems.

2. Availability: This refers to the amount of time in which a system can receive tasks, process tasks and output results without failure.

3. Scalability: This refers to the ability of the system to grow without causing technical debt.

4. Efficiency: This refers to the level of effectiveness, reusability and productivity of the systems.

Elements of a system

• Architecture - This is the blueprint that shows the layout, and behavior of a system. This can be illustrated using flowcharts of other software like Excalidraw.

• Modules - These are the smaller sub-systems or components that perform specific tasks.

• Components - These can be referred to as clusters of modules that are linked to perform a group of functions.

• Interfaces - These are the channels or pipelines which the components use to exchange information.

• Data - This is the battery of a system. It is similar to the blood in the human body. It transforms as it moves from one component to another.

Important System Design Concepts

There are different concepts that we need to know to properly understand how to design systems and they include:

• Load balancing

• Latency

• Sharding

• APIs

• Requirements Gathering

• Security

• Replication

• Caching

• Architecture

• Estimation

• Proxies

• Databases

• Servers

Conclusion

In this article, we have looked at what system design is all about, its importance and its elements. In the next post, we are going to dive deep into the concepts.

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