System Design & Scalability

A quick reference guide

Types of Scaling & Load Balancing

HORIZONTAL VS. VERTICAL SCALING

LOAD BALANCING[*]

• Round Robin
• Source IP Hash - a given client IP address will always go to the same server
• Request Hash - a given request type will always go to the same server/cache; avoids cache duplication
• Least Connections
• Least Traffic
• Least Latency

Data Storage Design

DATABASE - Read vs. Write Performance

Normalize vs. Denormalize

• Normalize - ↓duplicate data ⇨ ↑write perf but ↓read perf
• Denormalize - ↑duplicate data ⇨ ↑read perf but ↓write perf

Have your cake and…

• Use an append-only structure for writes; then asynchronously restructure data into a read-optimized format[*]

Complete Slide Deck

Please view the complete slide deck with Google Slides. As always, I would love your feedback. Please comment on this blog or on the slides directly. Thanks!