System Design Problems and Solutions

I enjoy designing systems with all their challenges. I have been designing systems for the past 25+ years. System design has been evolving, quickly, from on-premises design to the cloud and from Monolith systems to Microservices. Building systems in the cloud made it a lot easier to try new concepts and learn from them. It allows me to change and build systems, quickly. However, building systems takes time. With someone like myself, who enjoys the challenges of building systems and improving current systems, it was hard to find new systems to design every day. I enjoy the discussions and the debates around different pieces of the systems. In system designs, there is no right or wrong. It is a rather better design. To me, it is like a puzzle and putting the right pieces in the best way they can fit together. It is all about tradeoffs.

Therefore, I decided to post some of the systems I had with the solutions I proposed and hoping that this will generate such discussions in the comments for different design approaches and ideas.

Here is my first project:

I joined a company that had one Monolith database using Microsoft SQL. They have few websites to market rental apartments. They market for companies that own those apartments which we call them “Partners.” We get paid a commission for pointing the residents to the apartments. We provide websites where we market those apartments and provide tools for partners to update their listings. We collect information about people signing for the apartments through their CRM systems.

This system can’t scale anymore and need a scalable solution. There are lots of manual processes to get information from the monolith database that slow things down. How can you redesign this system to be scalable?