A visual guide to the 7 layers of scalable system design
goyalshaliniuk · x · 2026-10-26
Shalini Goyal shared an infographic breaking scalable system design into 7 layers, each with responsibilities, tooling, and examples:
- Client layer: fast rendering, caching, SSR and lazy loading (React/Flutter/Next.js)
- API gateway layer: routing, rate-limiting, load balancing, auth (Nginx/Kong/Envoy/AWS API Gateway)
- Application layer: microservices with domain logic over REST/gRPC (Node.js/Spring Boot/Python), DDD and SOLID
- Caching layer: client- and server-side caching, CDN delivery (Redis/Memcached/Varnish/Cloudflare)
- Database layer: SQL/NoSQL storage, sharding, backup and failover (PostgreSQL/MongoDB/DynamoDB)
- Data processing layer: real-time and batch workloads, ETL, event-driven actions (Kafka/Spark/Flink/Airflow)
- Infrastructure layer: container orchestration, auto-scaling, CI/CD, observability (Docker/Kubernetes/Terraform/Prometheus/Grafana)
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