System Design 101: Fundamentals

Master the art of designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems. From load balancers to caching strategies, learn the building blocks of modern architecture.

System Design 101: Fundamentals

[!NOTE] Who is this for? Developers moving into senior roles, students preparing for interviews, or anyone curious about how massive systems like Netflix or Uber work.

Why Learn System Design?

Writing code is only half the battle. As you grow in your career, the challenges shift from “how do I write this function?” to “how do I ensure this system handles 10 million users?”.

System design is the skill of defining the architecture, components, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. It’s about making the right trade-offs.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  1. Speak the Language: Confidently use terms like latency, throughput, consistency, and availability.
  2. Use the Toolbox: Know when to use a relational database vs. NoSQL, or when to introduce a cache or message queue.
  3. Draw the Blueprint: Visualise your ideas using industry-standard diagrams (C4 model).
  4. Scale for Success: Understand how to take a system from 1 user to 1,000,000 users.

Course Structure

This course is broken down into digestible modules:

Module 1: Core Concepts

The foundational pillars of distributed systems. We cover Scalability (Vertical vs Horizontal), Reliability, and Maintainability.

Module 2: The Building Blocks

A deep dive into the components that make up a system:

  • Load Balancers: The traffic cops of the internet.
  • Databases: SQL vs NoSQL, replication, and sharding.
  • Caches: speeding up access with Redis/Memcached.
  • Message Queues: Decoupling services with Kafka/RabbitMQ.

Module 3: Architectural Patterns

How to organize code and services:

  • Monolith vs Microservices
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • API Gateway Pattern

Module 4: The Interview Guide

Practical tips for acing the system design interview, including a framework for tackling open-ended problems.

Prerequisites

  • Basic understanding of how the web works (HTTP, DNS, Client-Server).
  • Familiarity with at least one programming language.
  • No prior distributed systems knowledge required.

Let’s Begin

Start your journey with Module 1: Fundamentals.