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Systems Design

⏱️ ETC: 10 hours

Understanding traditional system design principles is particularly important, especially when working with core node implementations. A blockchain node is a perfect example of how different system components must work together seamlessly:

  • Database Systems: Nodes require robust storage solutions to maintain blockchain state and provide quick access to historical data. Understanding database design principles is crucial for implementing efficient state management and data retrieval. You'll need to make careful decisions about data structures, indexing strategies, and query optimization.
  • Caching Layers: With the massive amount of data in a blockchain, implementing effective caching strategies becomes mandatory. Nodes need to cache frequently accessed state (like account balances or smart contract code), recent blocks, and validation results to maintain performance without constantly hitting the database.
  • Load Distribution: Even within a single node, understanding how to distribute work across multiple processes is essential. From transaction verification to state updates, nodes must efficiently handle concurrent operations while maintaining data consistency.

Consider a node processing new blocks: transactions flow through message queues for orderly processing, the state is persisted in databases for durability, frequently accessed data is maintained in caching layers for quick access, and all these components must work together seamlessly to maintain consensus with the network.

This interconnected nature of system components makes system design knowledge indispensable for building reliable and efficient blockchain infrastructure.

Systems design is a complex discipline in software engineering that requires years of experience to master. To begin learning this field, we recommend two key resources:

First, study the System Design Primer repository, focusing on its topics section. This reference textbook covers essential terminology and foundational concepts for scaling systems. The topics are organized to build your understanding progressively by doing a breadth-first analysis of the basic terms.

After mastering these fundamentals, we recommend watching Gaurav Sen's system design playlist. While this is a small playlist, this collection offers invaluable insights into both theoretical concepts and real-world architectures of large-scale applications. Generally for systems design, videos are useful for bridging the gap between academic knowledge and practical implementation, showing how major companies architect their systems.

💡 Tasks

Optional​

There's no better approach to diving deeper into system design than reading how real-world applications with millions of users have been designed. For this purpose we suggest going through the Real world architectures of the System Design Primer. In addition to that, the most extensive resource out there about system design is the System Design Fight Club (SDFC). We would gladly suggest this Youtube channel instead of Gaurav's system design playlist but it's very extensive and needs weeks of studying to go through all of the videos. While going through all of the videos would lead to significant expertise, you can start with the Classics playlist.