Fundamentals Study Portal

Key takeaways

• Narrow the prompt to a defensible slice before drawing anything; breadth without depth cannot be examined.
• Non-functional requirements drive architecture. Scale, read/write ratio, latency target, consistency tolerance.
• Specify p99, never average — tails compound across layers and dominate real page loads.
• Learn a handful of anchor numbers so you can produce requests-per-second and bytes-per-day quickly.
• Propose the boring design, then state where it breaks and at what number. Scale only that component.
• Stateless application tiers are what make replicas: N a real scaling lever rather than a bug.