Checklist

• What are the functional requirements?
• What is the data model?
• What are the non-functional requirements?
• What are the functional components/services in the system?
• How is data stored?
• How do we back up important data?
• Do we need reconciliation processes?
• What is the consistency model?
• Is there an exemplary model to follow? Is the problem we try to solve completely new?
• Is the system read-heavy or write-heavy?
• What is the scaling strategy? How do we scale the system?
• Is the system naturally partitioned? How do we shard data?
• Does the system have bottlenecks or hotspots?
• How do we monitor the system? Do we need an alarm system?
• What are the key metrics that can characterize the system runtime behavior?
• How do we store log files? How can we query log files?
• Can we implement distributed tracing? What is the trace context?
• What is the recovery process? How do we recover from a disaster?
• What is the deployment strategy? How do we deploy our code?
• How to set up a testing environment?
• How to document the system behavior?
• How will the system evolve?
• Do we anticipate any migration needs in the near future?

Common Techniques

• Make functional components stateless whenever possible. Stateless components are easy to scale.
• Make processes idempotent.
• Make the data flowing in the system immutable.
• Always validate the input data.
• Taking snapshots of the system can be helpful.
• Most of the time, having a dedupe logic at the entry point is helpful.
• Use replica to improve read performance.
• Use sharding or partitioning to improve write performance.
• Use message queue to decouple components.
• Use cache to improve performance. Avoid doing the same computation over and over again.
• Evaluate if an approximate solution is acceptable.
• Always have a translation layer to hide technical complexity.
• Logs should be easy to parse.
• All operations should have a timeout handling.
• Always assume network delay is arbitrary.
• Always assume we cannot tell the difference between a long delay and a disconnection event.

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