Systems design

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The basic study of system design is the understanding of component parts and their subsequent interaction with one another.^[1]

Systems design has appeared in a variety of fields, including sustainability,^[2] computer/software architecture,^[3] and sociology.^[4]

If the broader topic of product development "blends the perspective of marketing, design, and manufacturing into a single approach to product development,"^[5] then design is the act of taking the marketing information and creating the design of the product to be manufactured.

Thus in product development, systems design involves the process of defining and developing systems, such as interfaces and data, for an electronic control system to satisfy specified requirements. Systems design could be seen as the application of systems theory to product development. There is some overlap with the disciplines of systems analysis, systems architecture and systems engineering.^[6][7]

The physical design relates to the actual input and output processes of the system. This is explained in terms of how data is input into a system, how it is verified/authenticated, how it is processed, and how it is displayed. In physical design, the following requirements about the system are decided.

1. Input requirement,
2. Output requirements,
3. Storage requirements,
4. Processing requirements,
5. System control and backup or recovery.^[8]

Put another way, the physical portion of system design can generally be broken down into three sub-tasks:

1. User Interface Design
2. Data Design
3. Process Design

Online websites, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are used by millions of users worldwide. A scalable, highly available system must be designed to accommodate an increasing number of users. Here are the things to consider in designing the system:

1. Functional and non functional requirements
2. Capacity estimation
3. Database to use, Relational or NoSQL
4. Vertical scaling, Horizontal scaling, Shard
5. Load Balancing
6. Primary-secondary Replication
7. Cache and CDN
8. Stateless and Stateful servers
9. Datacenter georouting
10. Message Queue, Publish-Subscribe Architecture
11. Performance Metrics Monitoring and Logging
12. Build, test, configure deploy automation
13. Finding single point of failure
14. API Rate Limiting
15. Service Level Agreement

• Bentley, Lonnie D.; Dittman, Kevin C.; Whitten, Jeffrey L. (2004) [1986]. System analysis and design methods.
• Churchman, C. West (1971). The Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems and Organization. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-01608-1.
• Gosling, William (1962). The design of engineering systems. New York: Wiley.
• Hawryszkiewycz, Igor T. (1994). Introduction to system analysis and design. Prentice Hall PTR.
• Levin, Mark S. (2015). Modular system design and evaluation. Springer.
• Maier, Mark W.; Rechtin, Eberhardt (2000). The Art of System Architecting (Second ed.). Boca Raton: CRC Press.
• J. H. Saltzer; D. P. Reed; D. D. Clark (1 November 1984). "End-to-end arguments in system design" (PDF). ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 2 (4): 277–288. doi:10.1145/357401.357402. ISSN 0734-2071. S2CID 215746877. Wikidata Q56503280.
• Whitten, Jeffrey L.; Bentley, Lonnie D.; Dittman, Kevin C. (2004). Fundamentals of system analysis and design methods.

Look up systems design in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Interactive System Design. Course by Chris Johnson, 1993
• [1] Course by Prof. Birgit Weller, 2020