14. System Architecture Design
How to architect production search systems end-to-end.
Beyond Individual Components
Previous chapters covered individual pieces: indexing, retrieval, ranking. This chapter shows how to wire them together into a production system.
What You'll Learn
- Reference architectures: Google, Amazon, Elasticsearch patterns
- Query path: API Gateway → Retrieval → Ranking → Serving
- Indexing path: CDC → Kafka → Indexer → Search Engine
- Multi-tenant architecture and resource isolation
- API design: REST, pagination, response schemas
- High availability: failover, circuit breakers, degradation
- Build vs Buy decision framework
- Cost optimization: compute, storage, caching trade-offs