This course immerses the learner into the design of systems and makes them ready for any new design problems.

sys-design.tar.gz

basic

This course provides an alternate perspective to system design where we learn about building blocs first and then use them to build bigger, more capable systems.

Copy-System Design-The Missing Pieces

# Introduction
#key# URL: Uniform Resource Locator (URL), is an address that uniquely identifies a resource on the web. #key#  shortening is a service that produces short aliases for long URLs, commonly referred to as **short links**. Upon clicking, these short links direct to the original URLs. The following illustration depicts how the process works:


## Advantages
The key advantages of a URL shortening service are:
- Shortened URLs are convenient to use: they optimize links' usage across different forms of devices due to their enhanced accessibility and non-breakability. 
- They are visually professional, engaging and facilitate a higher degree of sharing possibilities.
- They are less error-prone while typing.
- They require smaller storage space at the user's end.


## Disadvantages

The URL shortening service has some associated drawbacks as well. Some of them are as follows:
- We lose the originality of our brand by using a short URL generated by a third-party service; many different brands using the same service get short URLs containing the same domain.
- Since we're using a third-party service for URL shortening, the possibility of it getting shut down and wiping all our shortened URLs will always be there. 
- Our business brand image depends on the trustworthiness of a URL shortening service; a wrong business move might negatively impact our business.
The competition for acquiring the in-demand custom short URLs is immense, so it might be possible that the best custom URLs are already taken by the time we start generating short URLs.

Let's design a URL shortening service like TinyURL.

System Design: TinyURL

Introduction