What is the Concept of System Design? How it’s Important for Software Engineering Professionals

System designing concept is an important topic for high level interview questions. It’s a very subjective concept. I face many system design interviews in my 16 years of career journey. There is no right and wrong answer; everything depends on how you want to design a system. In many interviews I couldn’t understand what was wrong. That’s why I am saying it’s a very subjective topic.

The same system you can design using relational databases and that could be developed using non-relational databases as well. Now it all depends on what the interviewer wants. In this article I am going to explain about system design concepts. Before going deep dive into the system design concept lets understand first what is a system first.

What is a system?

A system is a group of interconnected or interdependent components or parts that work together to achieve a common purpose or goal. In general, a system can be thought of as a set of elements or entities that interact with each other in some way to produce a desired outcome.

We can easily understand a system by the help of following examples as

An online e-commerce platforms amazon is an example of a system

A ride booking platforms like uber and ola are examples of a system

Similarly, digital payment wallets like google pay, phone pe or paytm are also systems.

A system takes some input parameters and processes certain steps and after processing produce a desired result.

Why do we need a system design?

The need for system design arises from the fact that complex systems require careful planning and organization in order to function effectively and efficiently. Here are some key reasons why system design is necessary:

1. To Meet Specific Requirements: System design is necessary to ensure that a system meets specific requirements, such as performance, reliability, scalability, and maintainability. Without a clear design plan, a system may not function as intended, leading to performance issues, downtime, or other problems.
2. To Optimize Resources: System design helps to optimize resources, such as time, money, and manpower, by identifying the most efficient and effective ways to achieve system goals. By carefully planning and organizing system components, system designers can help reduce waste and improve resource utilization.
3. To Ensure Interoperability: System design is important in ensuring that different components of a system work together seamlessly. By defining clear interfaces and protocols, system designers can help ensure that components can communicate with each other and share data as needed.
4. To Reduce Risks: System design helps to reduce risks associated with system failures, security breaches, and other issues. By identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities, system designers or architects can develop strategies for mitigating these risks and minimizing the impact of any issues that do occur.
5. To Facilitate Maintenance and Upgrades: System design can help facilitate maintenance and upgrades over the life of the system. By designing a system with scalability and flexibility in mind, system architects can make it easier to upgrade components or add new features as needed.

Why Are the Different Types of System Design

There are different types of system design, each of which has its own unique approach and focus. Here are four common types of system design:

1. Conceptual Design: Conceptual design is the first stage of system design and focuses on developing a high-level conceptual model of the system. This includes defining the system’s goals and objectives, identifying key components and their interactions, and exploring alternative design options. Conceptual design often involves brainstorming, research, and stakeholder input to create a broad understanding of the system.
2. Logical Design: Logical design involves creating a more detailed model of the system that includes the processes, data flows, and functional requirements needed to achieve the system’s goals. This stage of design often involves creating flowcharts, data models, and other visual representations of the system’s structure and processes. Logical design is focused on ensuring that the system can meet its requirements and is often used to identify potential issues or areas for improvement.
3. Physical Design: Physical design is the stage where the logical design is transformed into a concrete, physical system. This involves selecting specific hardware and software components, creating detailed system diagrams and layouts, and defining the specific requirements for each component. Physical design often includes testing and prototyping to ensure that the system will function as intended.
4. User Interface Design: User interface design focuses specifically on designing the visual and interactive components of a system, such as menus, buttons, and screens. This involves creating wireframes and prototypes, as well as defining the specific user requirements and preferences. User interface design is essential for ensuring that the system is user-friendly and easy to navigate, which can greatly enhance its overall usability.

What is Low Level System Design?

Low-level system design refers to the process of designing the individual components and modules that make up a larger system. This includes the detailed design of software algorithms, data structures, interfaces, and hardware components that are required to implement the system’s functionality.

Low-level system design typically follows the higher-level conceptual and logical design phases, and is focused on the specific implementation details of the system. The goal of low-level system design is to provide a detailed plan for how the system will be implemented, including the specific programming languages, software libraries, and hardware components that will be used.

Low-level system design involves breaking down the system into smaller, more manageable components and defining how these components will interact with each other. This may involve creating detailed system diagrams, flowcharts, and other visual representations of the system’s architecture.

One important aspect of low-level system design is to ensure that the system is modular and scalable, allowing for future updates and modifications. This may involve designing software components with well-defined interfaces and encapsulated functionality, as well as selecting hardware components that can be easily upgraded or replaced.

Overall, low-level system design includes defining the database architecture and ER-diagrams, creating tables and defining relationships between them, deciding a design pattern, classes structure and models and managing business from views and all.

What is High Level System Design?

High-level system design refers to the process of designing the overall architecture and components of a system at a conceptual level. It involves creating a broad understanding of the system’s goals and objectives, identifying key components and their interactions, and exploring alternative design options.

High-level system design is typically the first phase of system design, and is focused on creating a comprehensive blueprint for the system that can guide the detailed design and implementation phases that follow. The goal of high-level system design is to provide a clear and complete picture of the system’s structure and functionality, while allowing for flexibility and scalability in the implementation details.

Some key activities involved in high-level system design may include:

1. Defining the system’s requirements and goals, including performance, reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
2. Identifying the key components and their interactions, such as software modules, hardware components, data flows, and interfaces.
3. Creating a high-level system architecture, which may involve creating system diagrams, flowcharts, and other visual representations of the system’s structure.
4. Evaluating different design options and trade-offs, such as performance versus cost, or flexibility versus complexity.
5. Developing a plan for testing and validating the system’s functionality, to ensure that it meets its requirements and goals.

What are the System Scaling Types?

System scaling refers to the process of increasing or decreasing the resources (such as computing power, storage capacity, or network bandwidth) of a system to meet changing demands. There are several types of system scaling:

1. Vertical Scaling: This involves adding more resources to a single server or node, such as increasing the amount of RAM or CPU cores. Vertical scaling is also called “scaling up” because it involves adding resources to a single machine to make it more powerful.

1. Horizontal Scaling: This involves adding more servers or nodes to a system to distribute the load across multiple machines. Horizontal scaling is also called “scaling out” because it involves adding more machines to a system to make it more scalable.

1. Diagonal Scaling: This involves a combination of vertical and horizontal scaling, where multiple servers or nodes are added, and each machine is upgraded with additional resources.
2. Elastic Scaling: This is an automated type of scaling that dynamically adjusts resources based on demand. Elastic scaling can be vertical, horizontal, or diagonal and involves using technologies like auto-scaling groups or load balancers to manage resource allocation.
3. Fixed Scaling: This involves manually setting the resources of a system to a fixed amount and does not automatically adjust resources based on demand. This type of scaling is typically used for systems with predictable workloads or where resources are limited.

I have created a video on this topic you can watch it on my youtube channel. The combination of article and video help you a lot underst the concepts of system designing.

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2Fs6V7LYvug4k%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Ds6V7LYvug4k&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fs6V7LYvug4k%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

I hope you will find this article useful for your upcoming system design interview. Good luck!!! Please encourage me by mentioning in the comment box about the article. It would really help me to serve you better content always.

Conclusion

The system design is a very important topic for high level interviews. This is a very subjective concept where we can’t define exact right or wrong. All depends on what kind of system we want to design. There are two types of system design: low level system design and high level system design. There are 5 scaling types. We can design a scalable system by using them.