A practitioner's guide to building scalable systems

Building Scalable Systems: Distributed Systems basics to System Design Interviews

We want to give you the tools to compare multiple approaches and pick the one that works for your scenario.

Grokking the Distributed and Scalable Systems

When studying Distributed Systems, it's a good idea to spend some time understanding the salient characteristics of the building block of the distributed systems, i.e., Node.

Understanding these characteristics provides you with a framework to design and evaluate a distributed system.

We will look at the following characteristics:

1. Latency
2. Failure as a Unit
3. Consistent State & Ordered Operations
4. Clock

Let's get started

# Latency
Latency is the time it takes for a requested operation to complete.

## Latency inside a Node
Operations are expected to be fast within the node e.g.

1. Accessing a value in memory (e.g., CPU loading instructions/data in registers).
2. Reading a file from disk

## Latency between Nodes

Operations between nodes are relatively slow. There is network overhead.

> ***Are operations always slow between nodes relative to operations inside a node***?
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Yes. Similar operations are always faster inside a Node, e.g., reading a value from the memory of a remote node adds the network delay.
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However, reading a value from a remote Node's memory could be faster than reading a file from the local disk as disk operations are much more slower than the combined latency of remote memory and network.

## Latency inside a node is

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What and Why

Node in a Distributed System

Performance and Numbers

Fault Tolerance and Availability

Understanding TIME in Distributed Systems

Data Centers for software engineers

Scaling Distributed Systems

Load Balancers

Structured Storage at Scale

Sharding in Storage Systems

SQL vs NO-SQL

Blob Storage at Scale

Caching in Distributed Systems

Queues and Asynchronous Processing

Data Analytics and Batch Processing

Logging and Monitoring

Searching at Scale

Conclusion

Node Characteristics: Latency in Distributed Systems

Latency