FUNDAMENTALS & ESTIMATION
  • System design interview framework and approach
  • Capacity estimation and back-of-envelope calculations
  • Throughput, latency, availability and consistency tradeoffs
  • Designing APIs and identifying bottlenecks
SCALABILITY & PERFORMANCE
  • Horizontal vs vertical scaling strategies
  • Load balancing algorithms and strategies
  • Database indexing and query optimization
  • Rate limiting, throttling and backpressure patterns
DATABASES & DATA STORAGE
  • ACID properties and relational vs NoSQL databases
  • Sharding, replication and consistency models
  • Database design patterns and normalization
  • Choosing the right database for different use cases
CACHING & CDN
  • Cache invalidation strategies and TTL
  • Redis and Memcached patterns and use cases
  • Content Delivery Networks and geographic distribution
  • Cache warming and cache penetration prevention
MESSAGE QUEUES & EVENTS
  • Asynchronous processing and event-driven architecture
  • Message queues: RabbitMQ, Kafka, AWS SQS patterns
  • At-least-once and exactly-once delivery semantics
  • Pub/Sub systems and event streaming
MICROSERVICES & API DESIGN
  • Microservices architecture and service boundaries
  • REST, GraphQL and gRPC API design patterns
  • Service discovery and inter-service communication
  • API versioning and backward compatibility
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
  • CAP theorem and consistency models (Strong, Eventual)
  • Consensus algorithms: Raft, Paxos, Byzantine Fault Tolerance
  • Distributed transactions and saga pattern
  • Failure handling and resilience patterns
SECURITY & PRIVACY
  • Authentication, authorization and OAuth 2.0
  • Data encryption and secure communication (TLS/SSL)
  • Privacy considerations and GDPR compliance basics
  • DDoS protection and rate limiting
MONITORING & OBSERVABILITY
  • Metrics, logs and distributed tracing
  • Alerting strategies and incident response
  • SLIs, SLOs and error budgets
  • Debugging in distributed systems
CASE STUDIES & PATTERNS
  • Real-world architectures: Twitter, Netflix, Instagram, Uber
  • Design patterns: CQRS, Event Sourcing, Lambda Architecture
  • System design trade-offs and lessons learned
  • Best practices from production systems
PROJECTS & CAPSTONE
  • 6 end-to-end system design projects with detailed solutions
  • Mock interviews and problem-solving sessions
  • Trade-off analysis and architectural decisions
  • Capstone: design a complex system from scratch

Projects You'll Design

Real-world system design problems used in FAANG interviews

Project #1

URL Shortener

Design a scalable URL shortening service like bit.ly. Handle massive traffic, ensure fast redirects, and manage expiration with efficient database design.

Database Design Caching Load Balancing Analytics
⭐ Basic Level
Project #2

Video Streaming Platform

Design a YouTube-like video streaming system. Address content delivery, transcoding, caching, and handling millions of concurrent viewers with optimal bitrate selection.

CDN Video Encoding Streaming Protocols Message Queues
⭐⭐ Intermediate Level
Project #3

E-commerce Platform

Build a scalable e-commerce system handling inventory, payments, orders, and recommendations. Design for high availability during flash sales with consistent data.

Database Sharding Microservices Consistency Models Search
⭐⭐⭐ Advanced Level
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