Google's 3 Pillars for Building Resilient and Scalable Systems [Systems Design Sundays]
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How can you build resilient and scalable systems?
This is a question that is asked by managers, developers, and tech leaders every day. And if you believe the people that reach out to me for job openings, there are a lot of people who have been passionate about it from a young age. I thought teenagers talked about Football and gossip, but apparently, the actual thing to talk about is serverless computing. Parents, take notes.
Well, fortunately, Google has a good answer for us. And who better to look to than the Big G? After all, Google processes more than 20 petabytes of data every day. Google has three patterns that they promote very heavily, in order to build more scalable and resilient systems. Let’s get into what they are and how you can improve them. But first, time for a new exciting section of this newsletter, that you definitely don’t want to skip.
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The Three Pillars of Google
What is a Scalable System- A scalable system is any system that can handle increased loads. Ideally, you want your system to have the same performance whether you have 20 users or 200. Remember, most of the Tech Industry operates on the economic principle of Economies of Scale (things get cheaper the more you produce them). Thus scalability is a must-have in your systems. You will often see solutions sacrifice some performance to keep scalability. To understand this key principle in more depth, read this.
What is a Resilient System- A resilient System is a system that can handle all kinds of challenges. Can it handle users constantly refreshing the page? What about people with weird names (special symbols etc)? Can it ward off things like SQL injections and other black hat attempts? Since a lot of you said that you were into AI and Data, this is a very important field of research in Machine Learning. One of the things that’s being researched is called Adversarial Learning. Here is a quick intro to the topic
Pillar 1, Automation- I was surprised to see this here, but on deeper thought, it does make sense. The more you can automate your processes, the better equipped your systems are to deal with crashes, peaks, abnormalities, and other events that cause problems. More automation allows your system to stay running, even when your developers/admins are not around. Investing in more automation will help you improve the scalability and resilience of your systems.
Pillar 2, Loose Coupling- Loose coupling refers to decoupling your modules from each other (reducing their dependency on each other). This is very important because tightly coupled systems are more likely to shut down completely. A shutdown in one service might cause a complete breakdown in services that have nothing to do with that. Promoting loose coupling is very important. If you can design systems that are loosely coupled, then implementing the microservices architecture might be a good call.
5. Pillar 3, Data-Driven Insights- This made me very happy. Having more data about your systems will allow you to make more optimal decisions. Integrate lots of logging, constant monitoring, and some split tests for great results. If you are someone who wants to develop their skills with Data, reach out to me. Links are always in the end.
To those that want more details, a video containing introducing this concept can be found below. This video was made by Stephanie Wong, the Head of Developer Engagement at Google Cloud. You can reach out to Steph on her LinkedIn here. She has a lot of content for developers, so you might like what she has to share.
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