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Learning Paths / Learn System Design

system-design
intermediate
9h estimated

Learn System Design

Design scalable systems: fundamentals, scalability, caching, load balancing, queues, sharding, and microservices.

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Foundations

  1. 1

    Fundamentals

    Core building blocks and trade-offs behind designing software systems

  2. 2

    Client-Server Model

    How clients and servers communicate over a network to power most applications

  3. 3

    APIs

    How services expose functionality through well-defined interfaces like REST

Scaling

  1. 1

    Scalability

    How systems handle growing load through vertical and horizontal scaling

  2. 2

    Load Balancing

    Distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers for reliability and scale

  3. 3

    Rate Limiting

    Controlling how many requests a client can make in a given time window

Data at Scale

  1. 1

    Databases

    Where systems store, query, and persist data reliably over time

  2. 2

    Caching

    Storing frequently used data in fast storage to reduce latency and load

  3. 3

    Caching Strategies

    Patterns for reading, writing, and invalidating cached data reliably

  4. 4

    Database Sharding

    Splitting a dataset across multiple databases to scale writes and storage

Distributed Systems

  1. 1

    CAP Theorem

    The trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance in distributed systems

  2. 2

    Message Queues

    Decoupling services with asynchronous, durable message passing

  3. 3

    Microservices

    Structuring a system as small, independently deployable services