What is System Design

System design is simply the systematic process used to design the basic architecture of an electronic control system by defining essential elements like modules or components and their interfaces. This approach is used to design complete systems that would fulfill all the needs of a business or organization’s website/application. 

In simpler terms, System Designing is the smooth procedure used to represent the complex interactions between different components that build up the entire system together. The design is done in such a way that all the available resources are used efficiently, and developing the different components should be more accessible.

System designing is basically the task of mapping out the complete data and interface relations of the model so that the developer would design a system in such a way that it meets the end-user requirements. The steps to do so are by initially mapping out all the client requirements and the basic functionalities of your system. A good system design indirectly depends on the project management skills required to procure the available resources, reduce the overall costs and development timelines, and manage the risks involved. 

System Designs can be represented using different models or even just by simple flowcharts.

The process of designing a sound system can be basically divided into four stages, namely

1. Stakeholder Expectations Definition

The first step is to map down all the needs of end users of our product. All these requirements should be on the top priority list while designing the architecture, as the main aim is to create a system to fulfill all the business needs.

2. Technical Requirements Definition

The next step is to find all the technical tools we need to design the system to meet the client's requirements. Collecting all the necessary tools for developing the system beforehand would help you to build the design more quickly and efficiently

3. Logical Decomposition 

This step is crucial as it defines the relation between the technical requirement and how they can be used to design efficient systems. This process identifies which specialized tool can be used to meet the requirement and how we can implement all the relations to achieve our target. Basically this step deduces the logic to build our system.

4. Design Solution Definition

After mapping all the end user's requirements and deducing the logic to create the relation between the technical tool, available resources and user demands, we are all set to build our System Design.

Today, System Design is a mandatory topic to be prepared for a technical interview. Various IT giants, even FAANG companies, ask questions on different System Design topics like SDLC, Load Balancing, Caching and Object Oriented Programming languages. System Design problems are usually asked to test your overall expertise in your field. System Design Interviews are typically held for developers or programmers to check their ability to face a real-time problem or to judge their approach to solving the given situation.  

An important technique that can be used while solving such problems is to use the STAR technique. STAR is a short form for Situation, Task, Action and Result. This means linking the current problem with a previous experience, specifying the task of that experience, telling what action you took and then telling the interviewer the outcome.

Here is the complete list of concepts you need to cover to learn and master the System Design Course:

• System Design
• SDLC: Software Development Life Cycle
•  Structured Analysis Design (SA/SD)
•  Strategies for System Design
•  Database Sharding 
•  Horizontal and Vertical Scaling
•  Load Balancing Concepts in System Design
•  Routing requests through Load Balancer
•  Caching – For Beginners
•  Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
•  Structured Analysis
•  System Design- Object Oriented Analysis
• Types of Software Testing
• Security Testing
• Assurance of Software Quality
• Top System Design Problems with their solutions
• URL Shortening Service in System design
• System Design of Dropbox 
• System Design of Twitter 
• System Design the complete architecture of Netflix 
• System Design of Uber App 
• System Design of BookMyShow

You can find all these topics in this tutorial specially designed to prepare you for any System design interview.

Sometimes after designing the system, you may want to check its credibility. Hence the concept of system analysis arises.

For example, a teacher wants to check the performance of the different system designs of students in comparison with a known System; here, the system analysis procedure is implemented in such cases.