Summary

Building systems without a design is like trying to build a house without a plan. It might seem like you can just start putting bricks together, but in reality, you need a plan. In this chapter, we looked at the importance of system design. We also showed you how system design can help with many different aspects, including early detection of issues, agreement between key stakeholders on features, and communication between different experts collaborating on one system. We built our modular pipeline-based system to make stock trading decisions based on news about companies. We then saw how adding queues to a pipeline system can increase availability, and we rebuilt another mock of our trading platform using queues and learned how queues could store work for a component that is not yet ready to process it. This pipeline design will be expanded upon in the next chapter.

In the next chapter, you will explore the pipeline concept even further through workflow management platforms...