You're reading from System Design Guide for Software Professionals Build scalable solutions – from fundamental concepts to cracking top tech company interviews

Product type Paperback

Published in Aug 2024

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781805124993

Length 384 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Concepts

Application Development

Authors (2):

Dhirendra Sinha

Tejas Chopra

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Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Foundations of System Design

2. Chapter 1: Basics of System Design FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Distributed System Attributes

4. Chapter 3: Distributed Systems Theorems and Data Structures

5. Part 2: Core Components of Distributed Systems

6. Chapter 4: Distributed Systems Building Blocks: DNS, Load Balancers, and Application Gateways

7. Chapter 5: Design and Implementation of System Components –Databases and Storage

8. Chapter 6: Distributed Cache

9. Chapter 7: Pub/Sub and Distributed Queues

10. Part 3: System Design in Practice

11. Chapter 8: Design and Implementation of System Components: API, Security, and Metrics

12. Chapter 9: System Design – URL Shortener

13. Chapter 10: System Design – Proximity Service

14. Chapter 11: Designing a Service Like Twitter

15. Chapter 12: Designing a Service Like Instagram

16. Chapter 13: Designing a Service Like Google Docs

17. Chapter 14: Designing a Service Like Netflix

18. Chapter 15: Tips for Interviewees

19. Chapter 16: System Design Cheat Sheet

20. Index

Summary

In this chapter, we designed the URL shortener system. We first looked at why it’s a useful service to have and what some of the real-world use cases for such a service are. This helped us understand the importance of designing this system correctly. This was also useful to understand the scale at which such a system can be used.

We then started listing the requirements, both functional and non-functional. We classified some of the functional requirements as core and some as extended. Then, we went on to list the core APIs needed for this system to function. We also did some quick calculations to understand the scale, storage needs, and the number of characters needed in the shortened URL to serve the 3.5 T URLs.

After this, we started exploring various solution ideas to solve the core challenge, namely how to assign a unique shortened URL for a long URL. In part of the exploration, we identified various problems and tried to mitigate them by using some strategies...