System Design

Design systems, services, and APIs. Covers data models, service boundaries, scaling trade-offs.

architecture api-design scalability data-modeling

When to use

Trigger with 'design a system for', 'how should we architect', 'system design for', 'what's the right architecture for', or when needing help with API design, data modeling, or service boundaries. Covers trade-offs, scaling, and decision rationale.

Examples

Design a notification system

Architect a scalable notification service from requirements

Design a notification system that handles email, push, and SMS for 1M users. We use AWS and want to start simple.

API design review

Get feedback on a REST or GraphQL API design

Review this API design for our multi-tenant SaaS product. We need to support both REST and webhooks.

Microservices vs monolith

Get a trade-off analysis for an architecture decision

Should we split our monolith into microservices? We have 5 engineers, 50k users, and 3 distinct domains.