System Design Fundamentals

Basics of designing a scalable software system

Ali Zeynalli
5 min readJan 14, 2023
Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

So far we have discussed different software architecture topics in more low-level aspects, focusing on designing specific parts of software system separately such as backend, frontend, middleware etc. With this article we take the discussion to one step further and discuss designing a software system end-to-end. In designing whole system, besides detailed technical analysis the one needs to make thoughts about scalability of a system supporting from one user to million users. The absolute must-have pillars of a system design are:

Picking a database…

Database — whenever there is a need for a persisting data continuously, there is a need for Databases. Simply put, it is just a collection of information that is organised and saved for consistent interaction. In designing The different types like relational, non-relational databases are developed over decades to match different use-cases.

  • Relational Databases (also called SQL databases) like MySQL, PostqreSQL, DB2 are pretty popular alternatives that hold that in form of tables, rows with joining operations over primary, secondary keys.
  • Non-Relational Databases (also called NoSQL databases) like MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra are well-known examples that are categorised in 4…

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Ali Zeynalli

IT-Architect | BMW Group | M.Sc. Technical University of Berlin