Five essential steps for System Design

🔹 1. Requirement Gathering

✅ Understand what the system needs to do.

• Functional: What should it do? (e.g., users can upload photos)
• Non-functional: Performance, scalability, availability, etc.
  Ask questions. Clarify constraints.

🔹 2. High-Level Design (HLD)

📐 Break the system into major components.

• Choose architecture (Monolith vs. Microservices)
• Define key modules: frontend, backend, database, cache, load balancer
• Sketch a basic block diagram.

🔹 3. Detailed Design (LLD)

⚙️ Dive into internal details of each component.

• API designs, data flow, database schema
• Inter-service communication (REST, gRPC, Message Queues)
• Caching strategies, consistency models, etc.

🔹 4. Scalability & Reliability Planning

🌍 Make it production-ready.

• Load balancing, horizontal scaling
• Database sharding, replication
• Use CDN, rate limiting, retries, and fallback strategies

🔹 5. Monitoring & Maintenance

📊 Add observability to your system.

• Logging, alerts, dashboards
• Failover mechanisms, backups, disaster recovery
• Easy debugging & versioning