system-design

When designing a system:

1. Clarify Requirements

• Identify functional requirements (what the system must do).
• Identify non-functional requirements (scale, latency, availability, cost).
• Quantify: expected users, requests/sec, data volume, growth rate.

2. High-Level Design

• Identify major components and their responsibilities.
• Draw the data flow between components.
• Choose communication patterns (sync vs async, REST vs gRPC vs events).

3. Deep Dive

• Design the data model and storage strategy.
• Plan for scalability: horizontal scaling, caching, sharding.
• Design for failure: redundancy, circuit breakers, retries, graceful degradation.
• Address security: auth, encryption, rate limiting.

4. Trade-offs

• Document every trade-off explicitly.
• Use the format: "We chose X over Y because Z. The cost is W."
• Consider: consistency vs availability, latency vs throughput, simplicity vs flexibility.

Output

Produce an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) following the rules in this plugin's rules/ directory.