How to prepare system design questions for an IT company
System design is a very broad topic. Even a software engineer with many years of working experience at a top IT company may not be an expert on system design. If you want to become an expert, you need to read many books, articles, and solve real large scale system design problems.
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Here are some articles about system design related topics.
- The Anatomy Of A System Design Interview
- How to Succeed in a System Design Interview
- How to Rock a Systems Design Interview
- System Interview
- Scalability for Dummies
- Scalable System Design Patterns
- Introduction to Architecting Systems for Scale
- Transactions Across Datacenters
- A Plain English Introduction to CAP Theorem
- The CAP FAQ
- Paxos Made Simple
- Consistent Hashing
- NOSQL Patterns
- Scalability, Availability & Stability Patterns
Of course, if you want to dive into system related topics, here is a good collection of reading list about services-engineering, and a good collection of material about distributed systems.
If you are going to have an onsite with a company, you should read their engineering blog.
- High Scalability
- The GitHub Blog
- Engineering at Quora
- Yelp Engineering Blog
- Twitter Engineering
- Facebook Engineering
- Yammer Engineering
- Etsy Code as Craft
- Foursquare Engineering Blog
- Airbnb Engineering
- WebEngage Engineering Blog
- LinkedIn Engineering
- The Netflix Tech Blog
- BankSimple Simple Blog
- Square The Corner
- SoundCloud Backstage Blog
- Flickr Code
- Instagram Engineering
- Dropbox Tech Blog
- Cloudera Developer Blog
- Bandcamp Tech
- Oyster Tech Blog
- THE REDDIT BLOG
- Groupon Engineering Blog
- Songkick Technology Blog
- Google AI Blog
- Google Developers Blog
- Pinterest Engineering Blog
- Twilio Engineering Blog
- Bitly Engineering Blog
- Uber Engineering Blog
- Godaddy Engineering
- Splunk Blog
- Coursera Engineering Blog
- PayPal Engineering Blog
- Nextdoor Engineering Blog
- Booking.com Development Blog
- Microsoft Engineering Blog
- Scalyr Engineering Blog
- Myntra Engineering Blog
- Fastly Blog
- AWS Architecture Blog
- Lyft Engineering Blog
- Wish Engineering
- Doordash Engineering
- SnowFlake Blog
- Palantir Blog
The following papers/articles/slides can help you to understand the general design idea of different real products and systems.
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
- Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
- The Google File System
- The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems
- Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store
- Introduction to Memcached
- Cassandra Introduction Features
- Introduction to HBase
- Introduction to MongoDB
- Introduction to Redis
- Storm
- Introduction to Zookeeper
- Kafka
- YouTube Architecture
- Scaling Pinterest
- Google Architecture
- Scaling Twitter
- The WhatsApp Architecture
- Flickr Architecture
- Amazon Architecture
- Stack Overflow Architecture
- Pinterest Architecture
- Tumblr Architecture
- Instagram Architecture
- TripAdvisor Architecture
- Scaling Mailbox
- Salesforce Architecture
- ESPN Architecture
- Uber Architecture
- DropBox Design
- Splunk Architecture
There are some good references for each question. The references here are slides and articles.
Design a CDN network
Reference:
Design a Google document system
Reference:
Design a random ID generation system
Reference:
Design a key-value database
Reference:
Design the Facebook news feed function
Reference:
- What are best practices for building something like a News Feed?
- What are the scaling issues to keep in mind while developing a social network feed?
- Activity Feeds Architecture
Design the Facebook timeline function
Reference:
Design a function to return the top k requests during past time interval
Reference:
- Efficient Computation of Frequent and Top-k Elements in Data Streams
- An Optimal Strategy for Monitoring Top-k Queries in Streaming Windows
Design an online multiplayer card game
Reference:
- How to Create an Asynchronous Multiplayer Game
- How to Create an Asynchronous Multiplayer Game Part 2: Saving the Game State to Online Database
- How to Create an Asynchronous Multiplayer Game Part 3: Loading Games from the Database
- How to Create an Asynchronous Multiplayer Game Part 4: Matchmaking
- Real Time Multiplayer in HTML5
Design a graph search function
Reference:
- Building out the infrastructure for Graph Search
- Indexing and ranking in Graph Search
- The natural language interface of Graph Search and Erlang at Facebook
Design a picture sharing system
Reference:
Design a search engine
Reference:
Design a recommendation system
Reference:
Design a tinyurl system
Reference:
Design a garbage collection system
Reference:
Design a scalable web crawling system
Reference:
Design the Facebook chat function
Reference:
Design a trending topic system
Reference:
- Implementing Real-Time Trending Topics With a Distributed Rolling Count Algorithm in Storm
- Early detection of Twitter trends explained
Design a cache system
Reference:
- Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems
- Real-Time Analytics: Techniques to Analyze and Visualize Streaming Data
- Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
Clarify the scenario, write out user cases
Use case is a description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful. Who is going to use it and how they are going to use it. The system may be very simple or very complicated.
Special system requirements such as multi-threading, read or write oriented.
Define objects
Map identity to class: one scenario for one class, each core object in this scenario for one class.
Consider the relationships among classes: certain class must have unique instance, one object has many other objects (composition), one object is another object (inheritance).
Identify attributes for each class: change noun to variable and action to methods.
Use design patterns such that it can be reused in multiple applications.