Acing the System Design Interview 272104

Don’t be daunted by the complex, open-ended nature of system design interviews! In this in-depth guide, author Zhiyong Tan shares what he’s learned on both sides of the interview table. You’ll dive deep into the common technical topics that arise during interviews and learn how to apply them to mentally perfect different kinds of systems.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

Foreword by Anthony Asta, Michael D. Elder.

The system design interview is daunting even for seasoned software engineers. Fortunately, with a little careful prep work you can turn those open-ended questions and whiteboard sessions into your competitive advantage! In this powerful book, Zhiyong Tan reveals practical interview techniques and insights about system design that have earned developers job offers from Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, PayPal, and Uber.

Acing the System Design Interview is a masterclass in how to confidently nail your next interview. Following these easy-to-remember techniques, you’ll learn to quickly assess a question, identify an advantageous approach, and then communicate your ideas clearly to an interviewer. As you work through this book, you’ll gain not only the skills to successfully interview, but also to do the actual work of great system design.

For software engineers, software architects, and engineering managers looking to advance their careers.

Zhiyong Tan is a manager at PayPal. He has worked at Uber, Teradata, and at small startups. Over the years, he has been in many system design interviews, on both sides of the table.

The technical editor on this book was Mohit Kumar.

PART 1

1 A walkthrough of system design concepts

2 A typical system design interview flow

3 Non-functional requirements

4 Scaling databases

5 Distributed transactions

6 Common services for functional partitioning

7 Design Craigslist

8 Design a rate-limiting service

9 Design a notification/alerting service

10 Design a database batch auditing service

11 Autocomplete/typeahead

12 Design Flickr

13 Design a Content Distribution Network (CDN)

14 Design a text messaging app

15 Design Airbnb

16 Design a news feed

17 Design a dashboard of top 10 products on Amazon by sales volume

Appendix A Monoliths vs. microservices

Appendix B OAuth 2.0 authorization and OpenID Connect authentication

Appendix C C4 Model

Appendix D Two-phase commit (2PC)