A Practical Framework for System Design and Architecture
When engineers are asked to design a system architecture, it's often unclear where to start. Should you gather requirements, choose technologies, draw diagrams, or estimate load first? This article presents a practical framework for architecture design that helps structure the decision-making process and avoid common mistakes. Using a banking notification system as a running example, we'll walk through four key stages: understanding requirements, performing back-of-the-envelope estimations, creating a high-level design, and refining the architecture in detail. You'll learn how requirements drive architectural decisions, why rough calculations matter before choosing technologies, and how to reason about trade-offs between scalability, reliability, performance, and cost. The approach is equally useful for real-world system design and for System Design interviews.
- system design
11 min read