NguyenCuuNguyen Books: System Design and Interview Prep books
Table Of Content
Back when I was interviewing at the likes of Facebook and Uber, I also got feedback on how good (or not great) my approach was. There are many resources online - the most well-known one being System Design Primer on GitHub or reading High Scalability articles. In my case, I was looking for a more "structured" approach, as opposed to just dumping a bunch of concepts you need to know in these interviews. Here you want to create a rough architecture for the system. Draw out things like load balancers, web servers, app servers, task queues, database, caching, file storage, and so on. You should include all the core components you need to create the system.
Step 3 – Database Design
Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding of what to expect during a system design interview. Once the upload is complete there's still a lot more to do before the video is ready for users to access. The video needs to be encoded into multiple different quality formats, you need to generate thumbnails, and push copies of the video to the global CDN. Video content is the lifeblood of YouTube, and it doesn't exist without it. This means that making it quick and easy for users to upload videos is probably the most important feature.
(PDF) Semi-structured Interview: A Methodological Reflection on the Development of a Qualitative Research Instrument ... - ResearchGate
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It also includes many real-world examples to illustrate a systematic approach, with detailed and well-explained steps you can follow. Volume 1 and volume 2 cover a different set of system design interview questions and solutions. Although reading Volume 1 is helpful, it is not required. Additionally, the book focuses on backend systems design. Client-side systems design problems for native mobile engineers or web engineers are usually different - I've helped design both these types of interviews.
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In higher level interviews, however, there will often be a greater focus on testing your ability and experience at designing applications. There were a few topics that I missed from the book and that I would have covered. One thing you should avoid is "just memorizing" the approaches of the problems. I made this mistake when I interviewed at Facebook, and was asked to build a part of Instagram.
If you are interested in a more detailed explanation you can check out the system design playlist I linked to above which has videos covering most of these concepts. For certain apps with different requirements a NoSQL database might make sense. Often large systems will have many different services that use different types of databases depending on their needs. This design is very simple but has the essentials that you'd need for a basic implementation. At first glance it seems silly to ask somebody to design a huge app like Twitter or YouTube in minutes. These apps were designed over a period of years by hundreds of engineers working together, so it's clearly an impossible task to do in a short interview.
They will probably pick out a few specific components to focus on and ask why you made certain decisions. Depending on what you are building and the requirements, you'll need to weigh the costs and benefits of things like using a relational vs non-relational database. When modeling your data you'll also want to account for things like potential data partitioning and replication. In some cases you might not need to drill down to this level.
Books and More
The biggest struggle engineers have with system design interviews is that they are more open-ended and there isn't any single correct answer. This lack of structure can be intimidating, so my goal with this article is to give you a roadmap for navigating these types of interviews with confidence. A systems design interview is as much about communication with the interviewer as it is about your systems and architecture knowledge. This is why, while the book will help fill gaps you might have on how large systems are built, it won't substitute you collaborating with someone in designing a system.
While the book goes deeper in this space that what I have otherwise seen, there is room for more depth. Books can help with understanding the theory but are not a replacement actually working on large-scale production systems. These systems are always more complex than any book describes them. Comments help other users discover titles that are perfect for them. Be informative, insightful, and respectful, while being specific and relevant to the title you're commenting on. Now let's look at some of the specific components in detail.
At a high level, the web crawler executes steps 2 and 3 repeatedly. Donations to freeCodeCamp go toward our education initiatives, and help pay for servers, services, and staff. The main focus here is not on being highly accurate, but showing a logical thought process for calculating these numbers based on the information available to you. You should be able to propose alternate design decisions that could have been used and explain why you didn't use them. Read, highlight, and take notes, across web, tablet, and phone. A "file MD5" is a hash that gets computed from the file contents, and is reasonably unique based on that content.
Consistent hashing can be used to distribute the URLs across message queues. When the client updates or deletes any published data object, the server updates the real-time index and archive index. Both cover just about every major concept you need to know for your system design interview and should put you in a great position for success. To prevent this you'll have a task queue to manage this process and retry the processing attempt if it fails at any stage. You can use these numbers to calculate storage and bandwidth requirements with a few assumptions.
Imagine uploading a multi-gigabyte video to YouTube and then seeing the upload fail after 30 minutes when it's 95% done. To prevent this you'll want to support the ability for resuming uploads if the client's connection is lost temporarily. The uploaded video can then be stored with a distributed file system like HDFS. To calculate an estimate for bandwidth, we start with the amount of video watched daily. The key assumption here is how much bandwidth is used per hour watched, as this would depend on the quality of video most users choose to watch. What happens during this section will mainly depend on the feedback of the interviewer.
If the interview question is very high level like "design Youtube", you can probably skip this part. On the other hand if you get a more focused question like "design YouTube's comment system", it would make sense to go more in depth. There are hundreds of different features you could design like ad delivery, authentication, recommendation algorithms, comments, video upload, video processing, and many others. There are two main reasons why companies use these types of interviews.
You have a limited amount of time during the interview, so you want to make sure you focus on what's important. Apart from this book, there are other good resources to learn about how real-world systems are built. While the book presents decent solutions to each of problems, I missed having alternative solutions with tradeoffs. In several cases, you can tradeoff the number of machines (and thus cost) for latency, resilience for disasters for cost or latency, and so on.
And it's also a welcome refresher to those who are familiar with some of these systems but would like to venture into various other types of large systems. It is clear from the start that the book was written by someone familiar with systems at scale. The author is Alex Xu, a software engineer previously at Oracle, Zynga, and Twitter. This volume provides a reliable strategy and knowledge base for approaching a broad range of system design questions that you may encounter. It will help you feel confident during this important interview. This book provides a step-by-step framework for how to tackle a system design question.
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