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System Design: Uncharted

CoursesSystem Design

System Design

How the apps you use every day stay fast and stay up: load balancers, caches, queues, replicated databases, and the tradeoffs behind them. Design real systems on an architecture canvas, from one server to a global platform. No code required.

Intermediate to Hard
12 units
240 lessons

Follow the units in order, or explore any lesson that interests you.

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Course syllabus

12 units

1. The Request's Journey
Follow a tap through DNS, HTTP, application logic, and durable data, then draw the path yourself.
20 lessonsStart here
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2. Scaling Out
Replace one overloaded machine with balanced, stateless, failure-aware service capacity.
20 lessons
3. CachingPro
Place fast copies close to demand while controlling staleness, key safety, and stampedes.
20 lessons
4. Databases at ScalePro
Scale reads with replicas, writes with careful partitions, and choose data models by access path.
20 lessons
5. ConsistencyPro
Choose what readers may disagree about, make retries safe, and bridge transactional boundaries honestly.
20 lessons
6. Queues and StreamsPro
Decouple rates, bound overload, make duplicate delivery safe, and replay ordered event logs.
20 lessons
7. Inside Distributed SystemsPro
Reason about drifting clocks, uncertain failure, quorums, consensus, leases, and coordination.
20 lessons
8. APIs and RealtimePro
Design stable contracts, scalable pagination, protected edges, webhooks, and live connection paths.
20 lessons
9. Storage and MediaPro
Separate blobs from metadata, upload directly, transform asynchronously, and deliver media from the edge.
20 lessons
10. Resilience and ObservabilityPro
Budget reliability, bound dependency failures, see request paths, and learn from incidents.
20 lessons
11. BlueprintsPro
Apply the course mechanisms to a link shortener, search suggestions, a home feed, and chat.
20 lessons
12. The Design InterviewPro
Frame open prompts, estimate scale, narrate designs, defend tradeoffs, and complete two full mocks.
20 lessons

240 lessons across 12 units. Start with any published unit.