As a data engineer, it’s essential to understand how systems function in order to design data solutions that make the most efficient use of available resources. Data must align with core data quality principles, which means choosing a system architecture that best meets our specific needs.
I invite you to join me on a journey to explore system design and how it can be tailored to support modern data requirements. By the end of this journey, we should be equipped to select the most effective architecture to handle Big Data workloads and ensure high-quality, scalable solutions.
Single Server Setup
In this setup, everything runs on a single server: the web application, database, cache, and other components are all hosted together.
Here’s how the request flow works:
- A user accesses the website through a domain name, such as mysite.com.
- The Domain Name System (DNS) resolves the domain name and returns the corresponding Internet Protocol (IP) address to the user’s browser or mobile app.
- With the IP address in hand, the client sends HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests directly to the web server.
- The web server processes the request and responds with either HTML pages or JSON response for rendering on the client side.
The traffic source comes from two sources:
- Web Application
- Mobile Application
Key Concepts:
- Domain Name System (DNS): a fundamental part of the internet that translates human-readable domain names (like google.com) into machine-readable IP addresses. It is a paid service provided by 3rd parties and not hosted by our servers.
- Internet Protocol (IP) Address: is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network.
- HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP): is the foundation of the World Wide Web, and is used to load web pages using hypertext links
- JavaScript Object Notation (JSON): is a text format for storing and transporting data. JSON is “self-describing” and easy to understand.
Daniela Fernandez 