What Is System Design in Software Development?

System design is a crucial part of the stages of system development life cycle. Designing has always been a major part of any process. You can proceed to the developing part without a proper system design. System designing is like creating the skeleton of the whole project, which includes all the business logic. But how does it work?

If you have the same curiosity, let’s get started with us.

Why is Good System Design Important?

You might be wondering, “Why should I bother with system design when I can just start coding?” Well, there are a few good reasons for it.

1. Clarity and Understanding:System design helps you and your team get a clear picture of what needs to be built.
2. Scalability:A well-designed system can grow and adapt to changing needs without turning into a Frankenstein’s monster of code.
3. Efficiency:Efficiently designed systems run faster, use fewer resources, and save you from those dreaded late-night debugging sessions.
4. Collaboration:It’s easier to work with a team when everyone understands the system’s design and can coordinate their efforts effectively.

System Designing: The Basics

After gathering the requirements of clients in an SRS document, the software developing teams get into a great discussion. This discussion involves:

• Determining what the system should do, what features it should have, and what tasks it needs to perform.
• High-level decisions like whether it will be a monolithic application, microservices-based, or some other architectural pattern.
• Choice of programming languages, frameworks, and technologies.
• How data is going to be stored, organized, and accessed within the system?
• Design of the user interface, including layout, navigation, and user experience considerations.
• Addressing security concerns, including authentication, authorization, data encryption, and protection against common security threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• How will the system handle increased loads over time?
• Plan for error scenarios and define how the system will handle exceptions, log errors, and recover gracefully from failures.
• Outlining the testing strategy, including unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing.
• Discussing quality assurance processes and how bugs and issues will be tracked and resolved.
• Determining how the software will be deployed, configured, and managed in production.

Creating a Great System Design: Great Tips for You

Use Horizontal or Vertical Scaling Appropriately

The scaling in software development means how your future software will handle the excessive load. There are two models for scaling your software: horizontal and vertical.

In horizontal scaling, we add more machines (servers or instances) to your infrastructure. Each new machine runs a copy of your application, and load balancing distributes incoming requests across these instances.

On the other hand, in vertical scaling, we increase the capacity of an existing machine (e.g., adding more CPU, RAM, or storage). Figure out which model will be better for your software.

Microservice Will Ease Your Tasks

While developing large applications, microservices are best. You can break your architecture into small parts that are independent of each other. You can distribute the services (parts) to different groups of developers. Each part can be developed, deployed, and modified separately.

In the end, the collection of these completely developed parts can work or communicate together through APIs to run a huge application efficiently. As each part is isolated, you can update or modify any part without effective other.

Privacy Will be Better with Proxy Servers

A proxy is a channel between your server and the users. So, if the client wants to target a specific region or specific users, you can run a proxy on it. It will improve privacy and security. Not only that, you can also access the blocked resources and control the data management.

Follow CAP Theorem: Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance

The CAP theorem is also known as the Brewer’s theorem. According to this theorem, any distributed system can offer only two things: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance at a time.

In a consistent system, all the data can be seen by nodes, and if the availability is present in the system, all nodes would be able to get the data.

But in case there is a partition, the node won’t be able to communicate. Here, either the system can stay consistent or available.

Choose A Good Option for Storage

Your software might have sensitive that is meant to be stored in a secure place. Also, the amount or size of available is also necessary to consider in storing the data. You can use various storage and data managing techniques such as block storage, file storage, object storage, file systems, and RAID.

Bottom Line

I hope this little piece of content will be helpful to you. As one of the top custom software development firms, Intetics understands the worth of system designing and each step of SDLC. If you want to know how SDLC actually works, visit our site www.Intetics.com to learn more about us.