10 Essential System Design Elements You Need to Know (Part 2)
Tags: systemdesign, webdev, beginners, architecture
Published: 2023-12-26 15:17:00

**Introduction**
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In the first part of this series, I covered 5 essential system design elements, such as load balancers, proxy servers, database sharding, caching, and indexing. These elements are critical for building scalable, efficient, and reliable systems. In this second part, we’ll cover 5 more essential system design elements, such as message queues, microservices, containerization, event-driven architecture, and monitoring. These elements are also critical for building modern systems, and understanding them is essential for any developer.

1\. **Database Sharding**
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In the [first part of this blog post](https://swac.blog/ten-essential-system-design-elements-you-need-to-know-part-1/), I provided an overview of databases and how they are a prominent component in any system design problem. Now, it is time to take a closer look at some of the techniques used mostly with NoSql databases in order to allow distributing the data across multiple servers and improve performance and scalability. Database sharding is a technique for splitting a large database into smaller, more manageable pieces. It can be done in various ways, such as range-based sharding or hash-based sharding. In range-based sharding, the data is partitioned based on a range of values, such as date or ID. In hash-based sharding, the data is partitioned based on a hash value of a column. Sharding has its challenges, such as data consistency and distribution, but it’s an essential technique for building large-scale, high-performance systems. Since I have been facing several content piracy cases lately, this blog post has ONLY been published on [the Software, Architecture, and Cloud blog - SWAC.blog](https://swac.blog) and canonically to [dev.to](https://dev.to/khalidelgazzar) only. If you are reading it elsewhere, then [please let us know](https://swac.blog/contact-us/).

2\. **Microservices**
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The second essential system design element I will be covering is microservices. Microservices are a modern approach to building large, complex systems. Microservices architectures break down a system into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. Each microservice has its own business logic and data storage, and communicates with other microservices through APIs or message queues. This enables greater flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance, as well as easier maintenance and development. Microservices architectures are commonly used in large-scale web applications, such as e-commerce sites and social media platforms. Popular tools for building microservices include Spring Boot, Docker, and Kubernetes.

3\. **Containerization**
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The third essential system design element we’ll cover is containerization. Containerization is the process of packaging an application and its dependencies into a single container, which can then be deployed and run on any system that supports the containerization platform. Containerization enables greater portability, scalability, and flexibility, as well as easier maintenance and deployment. Containerization platforms, such as Docker and Kubernetes, have become popular in recent years due to their ease of use and scalability.

4\. **Event-Driven Architecture**
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The fourth essential system design element I will cover is event-driven architecture. Event-driven architecture (EDA) is an architectural pattern that emphasizes the use of events to trigger and communicate between different components of a system. In EDA, components can publish events when certain actions or changes occur, and other components can subscribe to these events to react accordingly. EDA enables greater flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance, as well as easier maintenance and development. EDA is commonly used in modern web applications, such as social media platforms and online marketplaces, to enable real-time updates and notifications. Popular tools for implementing EDA include Apache Kafka, AWS Lambda, and Azure Event Grid.

5\. **Monitoring and Observability**
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The fifth and final essential system design element I will cover is Observability. Observability is all about ensuring that our system emits useful data about all of its internal systems in order to have a bird’s eye view of the system’s health and performance. Monitoring is about tracking a single metric or a single system. Monitoring can help detect and prevent system failures, identify bottlenecks and performance issues, and provide insights for system optimization and improvement. Monitoring can be done at various levels, such as the application, infrastructure, or network level. Popular monitoring and observability tools include [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/) and [Grafana](https://grafana.com/). From a cloud perspective, [Amazon CloudWatch](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/) is a well-known AWS tool for monitoring. Since I have been facing several content piracy cases lately, this blog post has ONLY been published on [the Software, Architecture, and Cloud blog - SWAC.blog](https://swac.blog) and canonically to [dev.to](https://dev.to/khalidelgazzar) only. If you are reading it elsewhere, then [please let us know](https://swac.blog/contact-us/)

**Conclusion**
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In this second part of my series on essential system design elements, I’ve covered 5 more critical components of modern systems, such as message queues, microservices, containerization, event-driven architecture, and monitoring. These elements are essential for building scalable, efficient, and reliable systems. Understanding these elements is critical for any developer who wants to build modern, high-performance systems. I hope you found the series useful!