Learn System Design: Performance, Fall Tolerance, Auth & More

Approaches and Techniques for System Design

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  Experienced engineers look back at past projects and knowledge of the world to build systems that can scale and extend as requirements change.
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  Engineers must anticipate and plan for potential failures and bugs in their system, as well as consider feature requests such as enabling live interaction between musicians and audience members in a live streaming application.
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  System design can be approached from two different perspectives: from the customer to the server and database, or from the database to the server and customer, each requiring different ways of thinking.
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  The use of AI-powered natural language interfaces could potentially change the way programming is done, making it more accessible to ordinary people without programming expertise.
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  Using a stateless protocol like HTTP can make the server more efficient and prevent loss of context in case of server crashes.
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  System design involves satisfying the requirements of the system and defining the protocols or solutions to make it possible.

Importance of System Design in Distributed Systems

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  System design is a crucial skill for software developers and engineers to build large-scale distributed systems.
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  Large scale distributed systems are defined by their intensive use of compute and data, such as Google Maps which has to store the entire world's map.
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  Distributed systems require engineers to have knowledge of system design in order to build and maintain them effectively.
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  To avoid a single point of failure, multiple servers can be spread across the world or within a specific region, with data duplication or partitioning to ensure continuity of service.

Considerations for Live Streaming Systems

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  The most important feature for a live streaming system is that users should be able to watch the stream live, which requires ensuring the server doesn't go down and sufficient bandwidth requirements.
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  Web RTC is a peer-to-peer protocol that allows for video to be sent from the server to the client, while comments are always client to server.
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  To serve customers with different devices and preferences, a transformation service is needed to convert the live stream into different resolutions.
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  The quality of video playback is a crucial factor in customer satisfaction, and should be optimized based on network and device capabilities.