Layer 1 - The building Blocks

Series: Modern System Design

Layer 1 is the vocabulary. These posts cover the pieces every distributed system is built from — so later layers can talk about how they talk, fail, and store data. Named problems (Little's Law, consistent hashing, hot keys) sit at the end of this layer.

Posts

1. What Actually Makes a System "Distributed"?

2. Requests, Responses and Latency

3. Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling

4. Load Balancers

5. Reverse Proxies

6. API Gateways

7. DNS

8. CDNs

9. Caching

10. Redis

11. Databases

12. SQL vs NoSQL

13. Database Indexes

14. Replication

15. Sharding

16. Fallacies of Distributed Computing

17. Little's Law

18. Amdahl's Law

19. Consistent Hashing

20. Cache Stampede

21. Hot Keys and Hot Partitions

→ Next layer: Layer 2 — Communication

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