System Design Basics: How to Think Like an Architect
Published: October 6, 2025
System design is the process of defining the architecture, components, and interactions of a system to meet specific requirements — scalability, reliability, and performance being key.
A great system design starts with understanding the problem domain and identifying constraints like user load, latency, and data consistency. From there, you choose appropriate technologies: databases, caching layers, messaging queues, and load balancers.
Always think in terms of trade-offs: strong consistency vs. availability, simplicity vs. extensibility, and cost vs. reliability. That’s the art of being a systems architect.