Chapter 5: System Design Fundamentals & Infrastructure Security

The vocabulary and building blocks of system design: fundamentals, network protocols, load balancing, proxies/gateways, API paradigms, cryptography, and application security.

• Fundamentals of System Design: Latency, Throughput, Availability, and SLA/SLO/SLI
• Network Protocols & Transport Mechanics: OSI Model, TCP vs UDP, HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3, gRPC, RPC Mechanics, WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), Broadcast Patterns, Server Pull vs Server Push
• Load Balancing Strategies: L4 vs L7, Round-Robin, Least Connections, Consistent Hashing
• Reverse Proxies, API Gateways, and Edge Routing (Nginx, Envoy, Traefik)
• API Paradigms & Contracts: REST, GraphQL, gRPC Protocol Buffers, Event-Driven Systems, tRPC, and OpenAPI/AsyncAPI Specifications
• Cryptography & System Security: TLS/SSL, PKI, Symmetric/Asymmetric Encryption, KMS, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, and Zero-Trust Architecture
• AppSec & Threat Defense: OWASP Top 10, Threat Modeling, Secrets Management (HashiCorp Vault), and Supply-Chain Security
• Chapter 5 References