System Design

Learn how to design systems the way interviewers and real teams expect, one idea at a time. Six chapters with diagrams, worked numbers and quizzes cover the interview framework, estimation, APIs and data, unique IDs, caching and scaling. Then build a real design, step by step, in the System Design playground.

Who it is for

Developers and students preparing for system design interviews, and engineers who want to understand how large systems are built.

What you will be able to do

• Explain scalability, availability, consistency and latency with numbers, not slogans
• Choose between SQL and NoSQL, caches, queues and API styles and defend the trade-off
• Estimate load and storage with back-of-envelope maths
• Design a URL shortener, CDN, load balancer, key-value store, cache, auth system and a payments flow
• Spot single points of failure and plan failover and disaster recovery