Networking Essentials
Back to System Design
System Design
Networking Essentials
How distributed services communicate, what protocol to default to, and what breaks when networks get slow or unreliable.
🚧 This page is still under construction. More content and notes will be added soon.
Notes
Key Points
- Default to HTTP over TCP unless there is a clear reason to choose something else.
- Reason about latency, timeouts, retries, and partial failures before adding more complex infrastructure.
- Use WebSockets for bidirectional real-time communication and SSE for simple server-to-client streaming.
- Mention load balancers, TLS termination, and connection management only when they materially affect the design.
Interview Focus
Show that you understand how requests actually travel between clients and services, and where slow or broken links change system behavior.