1. How System Design Powers Digital Services

A service can stay fast by storing copies of data closer to users, splitting work across machines, and reusing common results. These choices reveal a central idea: large systems succeed by sharing work wisely.

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Servers fail, networks slow down, and data centers lose power. Replication, retries, backups, and graceful degradation help services remain useful even when parts of the system break.

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Messaging apps, video platforms, online stores, maps, and payment systems each demand different designs. Their architecture reflects trade-offs among speed, accuracy, availability, privacy, and cost.

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Backend engineers, architects, site reliability engineers, data engineers, and security teams use system design to build and operate services. Projects can range from a small notification service to a global search or streaming platform.

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Review this chapter with practice based on your mistakes.