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System Design Fundamentals

Design scalable, reliable systems — from load balancers to sharded databases.

Intermediate0.9 hours10 lessons
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What You'll Learn

  • ✓Reason about scalability, latency, throughput, and availability with concrete numbers
  • ✓Choose between vertical and horizontal scaling
  • ✓Apply load balancing at L4 and L7 correctly
  • ✓Pick the right caching strategy and avoid stale-data pitfalls
  • ✓Compare SQL and NoSQL stores honestly, beyond the hype
  • ✓Use replication, sharding, and partitioning for scale
  • ✓Apply CAP theorem and consistency models in real designs
  • ✓Use message queues and event-driven patterns
  • ✓Recognise CDN, rate limiting, and circuit breaker patterns
  • ✓Walk through canonical interview-style designs (URL shortener, news feed, chat)

Prerequisites

  • •Basic understanding of web applications and databases

Course Curriculum

Module 1: Foundations

  1. 01What Is System Design?5 min
  2. 02Scalability, Latency, and Throughput5 min

Module 2: Traffic and State

  1. 01Load Balancing5 min
  2. 02Caching Strategies5 min

Module 3: Data

  1. 01SQL vs NoSQL5 min
  2. 02Replication and Sharding5 min
  3. 03Consistency, CAP, and PACELC5 min

Module 4: Communication and Resilience

  1. 01Message Queues and Event-Driven Design5 min
  2. 02CDNs, Rate Limiting, and Resilience5 min

Module 5: Putting It Together

  1. 01Designing Real Systems: URL Shortener, Feed, Chat6 min

Practice for the Real Exam

After completing this course, test yourself with exam-style practice questions.

Practice AWS SAA C03 QuestionsPractice GCP PCA QuestionsPractice AWS CLF C02 Questions