System Design Interview Language
5 exercises — practise the vocabulary of system design interviews: why to clarify requirements first, back-of-the-envelope estimation naming and technique, bottleneck mitigation vocabulary, SPOF analysis and redundancy patterns, and scaling sequencing rationale.
System design interview vocabulary quick reference
- Requirements clarification: establish functional requirements, NFRs (scale, latency, consistency), and constraints before designing — not timidity, but structured thinking
- Back-of-the-envelope estimation: rapid order-of-magnitude calculation to validate design feasibility at stated scale
- Bottleneck: a component that limits system throughput; vocabulary includes read replicas, caching layer (Redis/Memcached), CDN for mitigation
- SPOF (Single Point of Failure): addressed by redundancy — active-passive, active-active, or managed service with built-in HA
- Failover: automatic switch to backup component when primary fails
- Scaling sequence: vertical → read replicas → caching → sharding — simplest first
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