Acing the System Design Interview

The system design interview is one of the hardest challenges you’ll face in the software engineering hiring process. This practical book gives you the insights, the skills, and the hands-on practice you need to ace the toughest system design interview questions and land the job and salary you want. In Acing the System Design Interview you will master a structured and organized approach to present system design ideas like: Scaling applications to support heavy traffic Distributed transactions techniques to ensure data consistency Services for functional partitioning such as API gateway and service mesh Common API paradigms including REST, RPC, and GraphQL Caching strategies, including their tradeoffs Logging, monitoring, and alerting concepts that are critical in any system design Communication skills that demonstrate your engineering maturity Don’t be daunted by the complex, open-ended nature of system design interviews! In this in-depth guide, author Zhiyong Tan shares what he’s learned on both sides of the interview table. You’ll dive deep into the common technical topics that arise during interviews and learn how to apply them to mentally perfect different kinds of systems. Foreword by Anthony Asta, Michael D. Elder. About the technology The system design interview is daunting even for seasoned software engineers. Fortunately, with a little careful prep work you can turn those open-ended questions and whiteboard sessions into your competitive advantage! In this powerful book, Zhiyong Tan reveals practical interview techniques and insights about system design that have earned developers job offers from Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, PayPal, and Uber. About the book Acing the System Design Interview is a masterclass in how to confidently nail your next interview. Following these easy-to-remember techniques, you’ll learn to quickly assess a question, identify an advantageous approach, and then communicate your ideas clearly to an interviewer. As you work through this book, you’ll gain not only the skills to successfully interview, but also to do the actual work of great system design. What's inside Insights on scaling, transactions, logging, and more Practice questions for core system design concepts How to demonstrate your engineering maturity Great questions to ask your interviewer About the reader For software engineers, software architects, and engineering managers looking to advance their careers. About the author Zhiyong Tan is a manager at PayPal. He has worked at Uber, Teradata, and at small startups. Over the years, he has been in many system design interviews, on both sides of the table. The technical editor on this book was Mohit Kumar. Table of Contents PART 1 1 A walkthrough of system design concepts 2 A typical system design interview flow 3 Non-functional requirements 4 Scaling databases 5 Distributed transactions 6 Common services for functional partitioning PART 2 7 Design Craigslist 8 Design a rate-limiting service 9 Design a notification/alerting service 10 Design a database batch auditing service 11 Autocomplete/typeahead 12 Design Flickr 13 Design a Content Distribution Network (CDN) 14 Design a text messaging app 15 Design Airbnb 16 Design a news feed 17 Design a dashboard of top 10 products on Amazon by sales volume Appendix A Monoliths vs. microservices Appendix B OAuth 2.0 authorization and OpenID Connect authentication Appendix C C4 Model Appendix D Two-phase commit (2PC)