Course
System Design in Practice
How real systems scale — from one server to many, caches and queues and load balancers, the failure modes that matter, and the trade-off vocabulary senior engineers use to argue about architecture.
The Building Blocks
Load balancers, caches, queues — the components every scaled system shares.
- 01From One Server to ManyThe progression every growing system walks — monolith → load balancer → cache → queue → read replicas — and what each step buys you.20mOpen
- 02Caching: The Hard Problem Is InvalidationRead-through, write-through, write-back, TTLs — and the stampede and staleness patterns that determine whether a cache helps or hurts.20mOpen
- 03Queues: Decoupling the Request PathWhy slow work doesn't belong in the request path, how at-least-once delivery really works, and the idempotency pattern every consumer needs.20mOpen
Scaling Data
Databases under load — replication, sharding, and consistency trade-offs.
- 01Replication and the Consistency MenuRead replicas, synchronous vs async replication, read-your-own-writes, and CAP explained in terms of what actually breaks.22mOpen
- 02Sharding: Splitting the Write BottleneckWhen one primary isn't enough — hash-based vs range-based sharding, the rebalancing problem, and the design questions to answer before you shard.22mOpen
The Whole System
Observability, failure handling, and designing an end-to-end architecture.
- 01APIs and Versioning at ScaleThe interface is the contract — idempotent endpoints, pagination, backwards compatibility, and the versioning strategies that don't break clients.18mOpen
- 02Blob Storage: Files at ScaleObject storage, presigned URLs, CDN integration, and the patterns that keep file uploads out of your app server.18mOpen
- 03Observability and Designing for FailureLogs, metrics, traces; SLOs and error budgets; circuit breakers and retries — the operational layer that separates a working system from a debuggable one.20mOpen
- 04Designing an App End-to-EndPutting it together — rate limiter, URL shortener, and feed system walkthroughs, plus the interview/whiteboard framework that maps to real design work.22mOpen