System Design Governs data engines, traffic topologies, and computing footprints required to maintain sub-second response times under massive, multi-region operational loads. Requirements & Workloads Functional & Non-Functional Demands Use Cases & User Journeys Domain Modeling Workload Characterization SLAs, SLOs & SLIs Constraints & Assumptions Capacity & Performance Capacity Planning Throughput Modeling Latency Analysis Queueing Theory Bottleneck Analysis Performance Benchmarking Scalability & Elasticity Horizontal Scaling Vertical Scaling Stateless Design Load Balancing Auto-Scaling Control Loops Elasticity Patterns Partitioning & Sharding Distributed Topologies CAP Theorem PACELC Framework Consensus Algorithms Leader Election Replication Topologies Clock Synchronization Network Partition Resilience Data Architecture Storage Engine Internals Relational vs. NoSQL Parity Vector Infrastructure & AI Retrieval Partitioning & Sharding Strategy Multi-Tenant Architectures Data Mesh Foundations Schema Evolution Consistency & Transactions ACID Transactions BASE Systems Isolation Levels Distributed Transactions Two-Phase Commit (2PC) Saga Orchestration & Choreography Caching Strategies Cache-Aside Pattern Read/Write Through Distributed Caching Cache Invalidation Cache Warming CDN & Edge Caching Multi-Level Caching Communication & APIs REST APIs GraphQL Integration gRPC Core WebSockets API Gateway Architectures Contract Design Service Discovery Messaging & Events Message Queues Publish-Subscribe Event Streaming Logs Lambda vs. Kappa Pipelines Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) Event Schema Governance Idempotency & Exact Deduplication Reliability & Resilience Fault Tolerance Patterns High Availability Disaster Recovery Economics Active-Active & Active-Passive Chaos Engineering RTO & RPO Compliance Observability & Operations Structured Logging Metric Compilation Distributed Tracing Synthetics & Real-User Monitoring Automated Alerting Incident Lifecycle Runbooks
