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System Design Foundations
How to Approach System Design

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How to Approach System Design

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The Four Technical Pillars | DevLoom

EXERCISE

1

The Four Technical Pillars

Understand the four critical technical decisions you must make for every component in your system.

Once you have your components defined, it's time to make them real. For every component, you need to make decisions in four key areas:

1. Database and Caching

What type of ? (SQL vs NoSQL)
Do you need ? Where?
How will data be stored and retrieved?

2. Scaling and Fault Tolerance

How will this component handle more users?
What happens if this component fails?
How does it recover from failures?

3. Asynchronous Processing

What can be done in the background?
What must happen immediately?
How do you handle long-running tasks?

4. Communication

How do components talk to each other?
HTTP? gRPC? ?
What protocols make sense?

These four pillars turn your conceptual design into a buildable system.

Pro Tip: Every successful system design makes deliberate choices in these four areas for every component.