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System Design: From Requirements to Scale

Learn system design through 28 focused lessons in seven modules. Build from requirements and APIs to relational schemas, indexes, transactions, estimation, load balancing, caching, replication and sharding. Each lesson contains a compact responsive diagram, a worked example, detailed explanations, a guided tutorial, interview questions and practice with solutions. Seven interactive experiments make concurrency, retries, capacity and key placement visible. Finish with a defended short-link service capstone. Basic programming is enough to begin; SQL is introduced with runnable practice setups.

7
Modules
28
Lessons
~19 hr
Material
Start the first lesson
  1. 1

    Requirements and the Design Framework

    Beginner4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: What System Design Is and What You Must Explain; Requirements Scope and Measurable Service Targets; The Five Step Design Framework; Rate Limiting Across Multiple Servers.

  2. 2

    Client Server and API Design

    Beginner4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: Client Server and the HTTP Request Journey; HTTP Methods Status Codes and Resource Contracts; Idempotency Timeouts and Safe Retries; Cursor Pagination and Choosing an API Protocol.

  3. 3

    Relational Databases for Designers

    Beginner4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: Tables Keys Relationships and Normalization; Indexes Composite Keys and Query Plans; Transactions ACID and Isolation Levels; Prevent Double Booking with Atomic Claims and Holds.

  4. 4

    Back of the Envelope Estimation

    Intermediate4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: From Active Users to Average and Peak QPS; Storage Retention Replicas and Backup Budgets; Bandwidth Latency and Request Concurrency; Cache Sizing Server Counts and Failure Headroom.

  5. 5

    Scaling DNS and Load Balancing

    Intermediate4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: Vertical Horizontal and Stateless Application Scaling; DNS Proxies CDNs and Safe Address Changes; Load Balancing Algorithms and Layer 4 versus Layer 7; Health Checks Draining and Failure Capacity.

  6. 6

    Caching and Failure Recovery

    Intermediate4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: Cache Placement Read Paths and Write Strategies; TTL LRU LFU and Cache Memory Limits; Invalidation Races and Freshness Guarantees; Stampedes Hot Keys and Cold Cache Recovery.

  7. 7

    Replication Sharding and the Capstone

    Advanced4 lessons

    Four focused lessons: Replication Lag Read Guarantees and Failover; Sharding Strategies and Choosing a Partition Key; Consistent Hashing Virtual Nodes and Resharding; Capstone Design a Short Link Service End to End.

Free learning material from Examate · All courses · ~19 hr of material

System Design: From Requirements to Scale — Free Interactive Course | Examate