Cache

Consistent Hashing is a cornerstone technology for distributed systems. Many of software developers don’t realize it, but Consistent Hashing is needed in many places: load balancers, caches, CDNs, id generators, databases, chats / social networks, and many other systems.

This topic consists of:

• Problem with rehashing and why we need hashing to be CONSISTENT
• Hash space and hash ring
• BASIC approach (introduced by Karger et al. at MIT)
• Advanced approach with VIRTUAL NODES

These items are disclosed in a very interesting Chapter 5 of the book:

Four standard steps for system design interview. However, I would think about them wider: as about four initial steps to design the software.

• Step 1. Understand the problem and establish design scope
• Step 2. Propose high-level design and get buy-in
• Step 3. Design deep dive
• Step 4. Wrap up

The chapter 3 of the book discovers details about each step, good questions to ask (to think about), DO’s and DONT’s. It also shows good example of the process of designing a news feed system.

A very short Chapter 2 is about how to make rough estimates to start from the most important parts when designing the software.

Some concepts that EVERY software developer should know:

• “Power of two”
• Standard latency numbers! How fast is memory, how slow is disk, etc…
• Availability numbers
• What are key metrics you should think about

These concepts and numbers are disclosed in chapter two of the book:

“System Design Interview – An insider’s guide” by Alex Xu

A great generic plan for scaling any app from zero to millions of users.

• Single server setup
• Selection and usage of database
• Vertical scaling vs horizontal scaling approaches. And why you should prefer horizontal
• Adding load balancer for horizontal scaling
• Adding database replication for horizontal scaling
• Adding cache
• Adding CDN
• Stateless vs Stateful architecture and using external state storage
• Adding extra Data Centers
• Adding Message queue
• Adding Logging, Metrics, and Automation
• Scaling database (sharding)
• and futher steps…

All of these is carefully but briefly disclosed in the Chapter 1 of the book:

Earlier this year the book club of our company has studied excellent book:

Martin Kleppmann - Designing Data-Intensive Applications

This is the best book I have read about building complex scalable software systems. 💪

As usually (to better learn) I prepared an overview and mind-map.

Chapter 1:

• Building blocks of the apps
• What is Reliability, Scalability and Maintainability. Examples and definitions.
  • Faults and Failures
  • Performance, Load, Latency and Response Time
  • Operability, Simplicity, Evolvability
• Why you should randomly kill your servers 😅
• How Twitter delivers 12,000 tweets per second to 300,000 readers per second. (VERY interesting!)
• How much money Amazon loses for each 100ms delay in their response time
• How to quickly calculate percentiles for monitoring response time in PROD

Download full mind map (PDF)