How to design systems for your actual scale — a practical system design tutorial System Design for Everyday Applications: Designing for Your Actual Traffic Most system design content assumes you're building for millions of users Day 1. But if you're building a SaaS for 500 customers, an internal tool for your team, or a startup MVP, FAANG-scale patterns are overengineering that wastes time and money. This tutorial covers practical system design for real-world traffic with reasonable capacity decisions. Start With Your Actual Numbers Before choosing any technology, calculate your actual load: Metric Small App (1K users) Medium App (50K users) When to Worry Requests/day ~10K-50K ~500K-2M >5M/day RPS (peak) 1-5 20-50 >100 RPS Database size <10GB 10-100GB >500GB Bandwidth <100GB/month 100-500GB/month >1TB/month For 10K monthly active users with 5 pageviews/user/day at 50KB/page: Daily bandwidth: 10K × 5 × 50KB = 2.5GB/day Peak RPS: ~1-2 requests/second You don't need Kubernetes, sharding, or…