System Design Tradeoffs

Source: Dev.to

Scaling

• Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
• Scalability vs Performance

Consistency & Availability

• Consistency vs Availability (CAP)
• Strong vs Eventual Consistency
• ACID vs BASE

Data & Storage

• SQL vs NoSQL
• Normalization vs Denormalization
• Read-Through vs Write-Through Cache

Communication & Processing

• Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication
• Batch vs Stream Processing
• Long Polling vs WebSockets vs SSE
• Push vs Pull Architecture
• REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC
• REST vs RPC

Architecture

• Monolith vs Microservices
• Stateful vs Stateless Design
• Concurrency vs Parallelism

Performance

• Latency vs Throughput
• Performance vs Cost