How can you design systems that are optimized for low latency and high availability?

2 Choose the right architecture

The architecture of your system is the high-level structure and organization of your components and how they interact with each other. Depending on your requirements, you may opt for different architectures, such as monolithic, microservices, serverless, or event-driven. Each architecture has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of latency and availability. For example, microservices can offer more scalability, fault tolerance, and modularity, but they also introduce more complexity, overhead, and coordination challenges.

4 Design for failure

No system is perfect, and failures are inevitable, so it's important to design your system for failure. This means anticipating, preventing, detecting, and recovering from failures gracefully. To do this, you should test your system thoroughly and frequently using different methods and tools. Additionally, logging activities and events in standardized and structured formats is essential. Debugging should be done effectively and efficiently with the right tools and methods, while error handling should be done properly and gracefully with clear messages, codes, and statuses. To make your system tolerant to failures, use techniques such as retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, bulkheads, or rate limiters. Finally, you should be able to recover quickly and smoothly from failures using backups, restores, checkpoints, snapshots or rollbacks.

5 Keep it simple

The last but not the least principle of designing systems for low latency and high availability is to keep it simple – as Leonardo da Vinci said, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. A simple system is easier to understand, maintain, and evolve, and reduces the chances of errors, bugs, and failures. To achieve this, you should use modularity, reusability, readability, and refactoring. Modularity involves dividing the system into smaller and independent modules with clear responsibilities and interfaces. Reusability involves reusing existing components or modules or using proven third-party components instead of reinventing the wheel. Readability involves writing code and documentation in a clear and consistent manner. Refactoring involves refining and improving code and documentation regularly with techniques such as renaming or extracting. Additionally, you should remove any unnecessary or obsolete code or documentation.