System Design Fundamentals

System Design Fundamentals helps software engineers learn the core ideas behind designing large, complex systems. You will cover essential building blocks — caching, load balancing, data partitioning/sharding, proxies, and more — and learn how these pieces fit together to meet real-world requirements like scalability, reliability, and performance.

Course Content

Chapter 1 — Networking & APIs (7 lessons)

• Network Stack Primer (L3/L2)
• Transport Layer Protocols: TCP, UDP and QUIC
• DNS, TLS, HTTP, Connection Pooling
• REST vs. RPC/gRPC
• Idempotency, Retries, Timeouts, Backoff, and Rate Limits
• Content Negotiation, ETags, Conditional Requests, and Caching
• Load Balancing Fundamentals

Chapter 2 — Storage & Data Modeling (4 lessons)

• SQL vs NoSQL
• B+- Trees, LSM Trees, WAL, and MVCC
• Transaction Isolation Levels and Anomalies
• Multi-Tenant Data Models in Modern SaaS Architecture

Chapter 3 — Partitioning, Replication & Consistency (4 lessons)

• Sharding Strategies for Multi-Tenant and Large-Scale Systems
• Replication Topologies
• Consistency Models in Distributed Systems
• Time and Clocks in Distributed Systems

Chapter 4 — Caching & Edge (3 lessons)

• Caching Strategies: Cache-Aside, Write-Through, and Write-Behind
• Hot Key Mitigation, Request Coalescing, Stampede Protection
• CDN and Edge Caching Strategies

Chapter 5 — Messaging & Streaming (3 lessons)

• Distributed Messaging: Queues vs. Logs for Beginners
• Delivery Semantics
• Dead Letter Queues

Chapter 6 — Reliability & Operability (2 lessons)

• Resilience Patterns: Circuit Breakers, Bulkheads, and Load Shedding
• Observability Basics for Modern Systems

Chapter 7 — Security & Privacy (1 lesson)

• OAuth2, OIDC, JWTs, mTLS, and Service-to-Service Authentication

Chapter 8 — Common Interview Scenarios (3 lessons)

• Rate Limiting: Concepts, Algorithms, and Best Practices
• Unique ID Generation Mechanisms: Snowflake, ULID, and KSUID
• Distributed Counters and Top-K Approximations