System Architecture Design

Introduction

The System Architecture Design process is a series of engineering activities aimed at transforming business requirements into a complete, optimized and scalable infrastructure and software model.

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The process of system architecture design steps includes:

Requirement Analysis & Scope Definition

This is the time for Technical Requirement Gathering & Analysis to clarify two core groups of requirements with Stakeholders and Product Team:

  • Functional Requirements (FR): What the system can do (such as ordering, payment, sending notifications, etc.).
  • Non-Functional Requirements (NFR): How the system operates (such as latency < 100ms, target QPS/RPS, 99.99% availability, OWASP/GDPR security standards, Cloud budget).

Capacity Estimation & Resource Planning

Preliminary calculation of operational metrics based on expected active users such as DAU (Daily Active Users) or MAU (Monthly Active Users)

  • Traffic Estimation: Calculate average and peak request volume (Peak QPS).
    • QPS (Queries Per Second) is the number of requests that the system needs to process in 1 second.
    • Average QPS: Average number of requests per second in a day.
    • Peak QPS: Number of requests at peak times, usually calculated as Average QPS x Multiplier 2–5 depending on application characteristics.
  • Storage & Bandwidth: Data storage capacity per day/year and necessary network bandwidth.
  • Memory/Cache: RAM capacity needed for Caching to offload the Database.

Architectural Style & Tech Stack Selection

Making Foundational Decisions

High-Level Design (HLD)

Designing the Overall Structure Diagram to build the Big Picture of the system:

  • Draw High-Level Architecture Diagram showing Client, Load Balancer, API Gateway, Services, Databases and CDN.
  • Define Bounded Contexts between Services and main Data Flow between components.

Low-Level Design (LLD)

Detailed Design of each Component by diving deep into technical details for each Service:

Architecture Review & Documentation

Evaluating Trade-offs & Documenting Architecture including:

  • Trade-off Analysis: Evaluate risks, Bottlenecks and Single Points of Failure (SPOF).
  • Documentation: Complete System Architecture Document (SAD) including Architecture Decision Records (ADR) to record why technology A was chosen instead of B.

Principles

Core principles to remember when designing:

  • Keep It Simple (KISS): Start with the simplest architecture possible that can solve the problem. Do not adopt Microservices or Kafka too early if scale does not require it yet.
  • Design for Failure: Any hardware, service or network can go down at any time. Always design self-healing mechanisms, backup and Redundancy.
  • Decoupling: Separate modules and services to reduce dependencies and easily develop, upgrade and scale independently without affecting the entire system.

Happy coding!

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