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98-system-design-concepts-neo-kim-2026

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98 System Design Concepts for Software Engineers (2026)

  • Source: LinkedIn Post
  • Author: Neo Kim (342K followers)
  • Tags: system-design software-engineering architecture career

Full List

Foundational

  1. Scalability
  2. Availability
  3. Reliability
  4. Latency
  5. Throughput
  6. Capacity

Architecture Patterns

  1. Client-Server
  2. Database
  3. SQL vs NoSQL
  4. Load Balancing
  5. Caching
  6. Cache Invalidation
  7. CDN
  8. DNS
  9. API Design
  10. REST
  11. GraphQL
  12. gRPC

Security & Access

  1. Authentication
  2. Authorization
  3. Rate Limiting

Distributed Systems

  1. Fault Tolerance
  2. High Availability
  3. CAP Theorem
  4. Consistency Models
  5. Replication
  6. Partitioning
  7. Sharding

Data & Storage

  1. Indexing
  2. Denormalization
  3. ACID
  4. BASE

Architecture Styles

  1. Microservices
  2. Monolith
  3. Event-Driven
  4. Message Queue
  5. Pub/Sub
  6. Sync vs Async

Resilience Patterns

  1. Idempotency
  2. Backpressure
  3. Circuit Breaker
  4. Bulkhead
  5. Retry Logic
  6. Timeout
  7. Service Discovery
  8. API Gateway
  9. Load Shedding

Deployment

  1. Autoscaling
  2. Blue-Green
  3. Canary Release
  4. Feature Flags

Observability

  1. Observability
  2. Logging
  3. Metrics
  4. Tracing
  5. Correlation ID
  6. Monitoring
  7. Alerting

Search & Data

  1. Full-Text Search
  2. Time Series
  3. Vector DB
  4. Materialized View
  5. Query Optimization
  6. Connection Pooling

Caching Deep

  1. Cache Stampede
  2. Cache Warming
  3. CDN Caching

Data Formats

  1. Data Compression
  2. Serialization
  3. Deserialization

Real-Time

  1. WebSockets
  2. WebRTC

Advanced Patterns

  1. CQRS
  2. Event Sourcing
  3. Service Mesh
  4. Sidecar
  5. BFF (Backend for Frontend)
  6. Strangler Pattern

Data Structures

  1. LSM Trees
  2. B-Trees
  3. Merkle Trees
  4. Bloom Filter
  5. HyperLogLog

Processing

  1. MapReduce
  2. Batch Processing
  3. Stream Processing
  4. ETL
  5. Data Pipeline
  6. Data Lake
  7. Data Warehouse

Security & Operations

  1. Secrets Management
  2. RBAC
  3. SSO
  4. Encryption
  5. Checksum
  6. Erasure Coding
  7. Consensus
  8. Leader Election

Key Insight from Comments

“The senior signal isn’t recognizing 98 concepts but knowing when to push back on the 30 that don’t fit your scale, traffic, or team size. Knowing when not to add a queue is the move.” — Petar Ivanov

“The real skill is understanding the trade-offs. Anyone can memorize concepts, but knowing when not to add caching, microservices, or another database separates senior from everyone else.”

“In 2026, the biggest risk is over-engineering. The best architects know when to ignore 70 of these in favor of simplicity.” — Ashish Patel

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