System Design Pattern Shortcuts

Use these as recall prompts after understanding the underlying trade-offs. They are not substitutes for requirements analysis.

• Write + Spike: Queue
• Latency + Global: CDN
• Load + Growth: Scale Out
• Read + Bottleneck: Cache
• Requests + Spike: Throttle
• Retry + Safety: Idempotent
• Core + Failure: Redundancy
• Dataset + Growth: Sharding
• Text + Search: Inverted Index
• Upload + Large-file: Chunking
• Durability + Failure: Replication
• Broadcast + Realtime: Pub/Sub
• Location + Search: Geohashing
• Write + Conflict: Optimistic Lock
• Untrusted + Execution: Container
• Realtime + Updates: WebSockets
• Traffic + Reliability: Load Balancer
• Distributed + Transaction: Saga pattern
• Concurrency + Consistency: Row Locking