7 System Design Concepts Explained in 10 Minutes

Seven fundamental concepts power reliable distributed systems: CAP theorem forces choosing between consistency and availability during network partitions, eventual consistency enables high performance through delayed convergence, load balancers distribute traffic using Layer 4 or Layer 7 strategies, consistent hashing minimizes data movement when scaling nodes, circuit breakers prevent cascade failures by blocking requests to failing services, rate limiting protects against overload using token bucket or sliding window algorithms, and monitoring provides visibility through metrics, logs, traces, and events to maintain system health.