System Design Cheat Sheet: High Availability, High Scalability, and High Throughput

🎯 High Availability

Designing for uptime? Think "3 nines" (99.9%) or "4 nines" (99.99%), meaning your service can only be down for 8.64 seconds a day at 99.99%. Achieve this with redundancy strategies like:

Hot-hot: All instances actively handle traffictraffic.hot

Hot-warm: Backup instances stay ready to take over.

Single-leader cluster: One leader handles writes; replicas handle reads.

Leaderless cluster: No single point of failure—nodes coordinate directly.

🎯 High Throughput

Need to handle a high volume of requests? Measure using QPS (queries per second) or TPS (transactions per second) and design accordingly.

🎯 High Scalability

A scalable system grows with demand. Use:

Horizontal scaling: Add more machines for volume.

Vertical scaling: Add power to existing machines for functionality.

Monitor response time to know when to scale!

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