Core Building Blocks
Learn the essential components and patterns used to build scalable, resilient, and high-performance distributed systems.
Module 3: Core Building Blocks
Once you understand system fundamentals and non-functional requirements, the next step is learning the core building blocks used to construct real-world systems.
This module introduces the most commonly used infrastructure components, architectural patterns, and design techniques that enable systems to scale, remain available under load, and behave predictably under failure.
These building blocks appear repeatedly in production systems and system design interviews.
What You Will Learn
Load Balancing (Introduction & Techniques)
Learn how traffic is distributed across multiple servers.
Understand why load balancing is essential for scalability and availability, and explore common algorithms such as round-robin, least connections, and hashing-based routing.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
Understand how content is served closer to users.
Learn how CDNs reduce latency, offload origin servers, and improve global performance.
Advanced Caching
Go beyond basic caching concepts.
Learn advanced cache placement strategies, eviction policies, and consistency trade-offs in distributed systems.
Rate Limiting
Learn how systems protect themselves from abuse and overload.
Understand common rate-limiting algorithms and how they help maintain system stability and fairness.
Forward Proxy & Reverse Proxy
Understand how proxies sit in the request path.
Learn the differences between forward and reverse proxies and their roles in security, performance, and traffic control.
Scale Cube
Learn a structured approach to scaling systems.
Understand how systems scale along different dimensions—functional decomposition, data partitioning, and replication.
Idempotency
Understand how systems safely handle retries.
Learn why idempotency is critical for distributed systems, especially in the presence of network failures and duplicate requests.
Bloom Filters
Learn how probabilistic data structures improve efficiency.
Understand how Bloom filters enable fast membership checks while trading off accuracy for performance and memory efficiency.
Pub/Sub & Event-Driven Architectures
Understand asynchronous communication patterns.
Learn how publish–subscribe systems decouple producers and consumers and enable scalable, event-driven designs.
Monolith vs Microservices
Learn how systems are structured at a macro level.
Understand the trade-offs between monolithic and microservices architectures, and why there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Why This Module Matters
These building blocks are the tools of the trade for system designers.
Mastering them allows you to:
- Translate non-functional requirements into concrete architecture
- Choose the right component for the right problem
- Avoid common scalability and reliability pitfalls
- Design systems that evolve gracefully as requirements grow
Outcome of This Module
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Recognize common system design patterns in real systems
- Explain why specific components are used in an architecture
- Reason about trade-offs between complexity, performance, and reliability
- Confidently apply these building blocks in system design discussions
What’s Next
With these core building blocks in place, you will be ready to design end-to-end systems, where multiple components work together to meet strict non-functional requirements.
Begin with Load Balancing to understand how scalable systems handle traffic from day one.