System Design Template

This template helps you design large-scale distributed systems with proper architecture, scalability considerations, and technology choices. It covers system requirements, component design, and infrastructure planning.

Sample Prompt

Design a scalable chat application system:
- Requirements: real-time messaging, 10M users, message persistence
- Components: API gateway, message service, user service, notification service
- Database: message storage, user data, session management
- Infrastructure: load balancing, caching, monitoring
- Scalability: horizontal scaling, data partitioning

Include architecture diagrams and technology choices.

What This Template Covers

  • Requirements analysis and capacity planning
  • High-level architecture with component interactions
  • Database design and data modeling
  • Scalability strategies and performance optimization
  • Infrastructure components and deployment considerations
  • Monitoring and observability setup

Best Practices

  1. Start with requirements - Define functional and non-functional needs clearly
  2. Design for scale - Plan for 10x growth from day one
  3. Use microservices judiciously - Balance service boundaries with complexity
  4. Implement proper caching - Multiple cache layers for different access patterns
  5. Plan for failures - Design redundancy and graceful degradation
  6. Monitor everything - Comprehensive logging, metrics, and alerting
  7. Automate deployments - Infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines
  8. Security by design - Authentication, authorization, and data protection

When to Use This Template

  • Designing new large-scale applications
  • Planning system architecture for existing applications
  • Preparing for technical interviews
  • Creating architecture documentation
  • Scaling existing systems
  • Technology stack evaluation and selection

The Script

peep system-design