Understand the Goal and Gather All the Requirements
System design interview questions, by nature, are vague or abstract. Asking questions about the exact scope of the problem, and clarifying functional requirements early in the interview is essential. Usually, requirements are divided into three parts:
These are the requirements that the end user specifically demands as basic functionalities that the system should offer. All these functionalities need to be necessarily incorporated into the system as part of the contract.
For example:
- “What are the features that we need to design for this system?”
- “What are the edge cases we need to consider, if any, in our design?”
These are the quality constraints that the system must satisfy according to the project contract. The priority or extent to which these factors are implemented varies from one project to another. They are also called non-behavioral requirements. For example, portability, maintainability, reliability, scalability, security, etc.
For example:
- “Each request should be processed with the minimum latency”
- “System should be highly available”
1.3 Extended requirements
These are basically “nice to have” requirements that might be out of the scope of the system.
For example:
- “Our system should record metrics and analytics”
- “Service health and performance monitoring?”
How to Crack System Design Interview Round
In the System Design Interview round, You will have to give a clear explanation about designing large scalable distributed systems (like Twitter, Messenger, Netflix, Uber, etc..) to the interviewer. This round may be a challenging and complex round for you because you are supposed to cover all the topics and tradeoffs within this limited time frame which seems to be impossible. But this article will work as a guide to solve all these doubts and problems and make you excel in the System Design Interview Round
Steps to Crack System Design Interview Round
- Steps to Crack System Design Round in Interviews
- Understand the Goal and Gather All the Requirements
- Understand the Estimation and Constraints
- Define the Data model design
- API design
- High-level component design
- Detailed design
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks
- Most Frequently asked Problems for System Design
- Quick Tips and Strategies for Succeding in System Design Interview Round:
- Importance of Communication in System Design Interview Round
- Do’s and Dont’s in System Design Interview Round