A pro for the book is how the case studies in the book cover good ground, and a variety of problems: Cache inventory information (aggregates) in Redis to reduce database load and improve read performance. The book covers diverse topics, from scaling user traffic to designing complex systems like chat systems and search autocomplete systems. I think I got out of it a lot less than I’ve expected. I only read what was in the book, did not follow up on the references. I would have liked it more if the chapters were more detailed and forced me to think more when reading (instead of hoping I won’t be lazy and do the extra work of looking up references). The guide is created by Alex Xu and Sahn Lam both of whom have battled it out in the tech giants. This insider perspective promises a real-world understanding of what’s expected in system design interviews. 2. Comprehensive Coverage

The short answer to this question is Yes, System Design Interview — An Insider’s Guide Volume 1 and 2 by Alex Xu and Sahn Lam is still relevant in 2023–2024 and definitely worth it for anyone preparing System design interview.The second version of the book took a year to write. Alex progressed roughly one chapter per month. He shared how coming up with "easy to understand" diagrams were time-consuming, as was finding the balance of progressing with "good enough" speed for the reader to follow. The Lambda architecture maintains the batch and stream processing paths separately, whereas the Kappa architecture combines them into one. This book is most useful as a way to see the things that an experienced distributed systems engineer would explore when answering a systems design interview that go beyond the rote answer to the question (what's the overall data flow and where should it run). Topics like AuthN/Z, partitioning, Abuse (DDOS, malware, abuse imagery, etc), Datacenter failure tolerance, etc are mentioned in follow ups. Location history should be batched before being sent to the server. Even so, it would be good to choose a database optimized for write throughput, such as Cassandra.

Kafka is used to decouple services that trigger reindexing and services that actually perform reindexing. Apart from this book, there are other good resources to learn about how real-world systems are built. A systems design interview is as much about communication with the interviewer as it is about your systems and architecture knowledge. This is why, while the book will help fill gaps you might have on how large systems are built, it won't substitute you collaborating with someone in designing a system.Note that all of the above courses are a time-based subscription, meaning you lose access to them after a year. Another reason why getting a book might be a good investment: pay once; keep it forever. Now that the short review is over, let’s deep dive into this book and System design interview in general to find more. If fan-out on score updates (e.g. notification) is needed, use a message broker to connect the game service and the leaderboard service.