Alex Xu > Quotes

“Single server setup”
― Alex Xu, System Design Interview – An insider's guide

“In a distributed system, it is insufficient to believe that a server is down because another server says so. Usually, it requires at least two independent sources of information to mark a server down.”
― Alex Xu, System Design Interview – An insider's guide

“Vertical scaling, referred to as “scale up”, means the process of adding more power (CPU, RAM, etc.) to your servers. Horizontal scaling, referred to as “scale-out”, allows you to scale by adding more servers into your pool of resources.”
― Alex Xu, System Design Interview – An insider's guide

“Over-engineering is a real disease of many engineers as they delight in design purity and ignore tradeoffs.”
― Alex Xu, System Design Interview – An insider's guide

“Non-relational databases might be the right choice if: •Your application requires super-low latency. •Your data are unstructured, or you do not have any relational data. •You only need to serialize and deserialize data (JSON, XML, YAML, etc.). •You need to store a massive amount of data.”
― Alex Xu, System Design Interview – An insider's guide

“The benefits of having a separate cache tier include better system performance, ability to reduce database workloads, and the ability to scale the cache tier independently.”
― Alex Xu, System Design Interview – An insider's guide