System Design For Beginners

This is a no-nonsense system design course for absolute beginners. This course focuses on building the thought process for system design. Asking the right questions and designing things logically rather than memorizing things.

This course builds a system around a photo-sharing app like Instagram for millions of users. Every lesson starts with some component breaking - either the server dies, a query takes 4 seconds, or the server logs everyone out, then covers the component that fixes it, and the new problem the newly added component creates.

Across multiple lessons, you'll build the full foundation: functional and non-functional requirements, scaling, load balancing and load balancers, SQL vs NoSQL, indexing to fasten up the queries, caching, replication, sharding, CDNs and object storage, message queues, timeouts and retries, rate limiting, CAP theorem, and monitoring. Everything is covered in plain layman's language; you don’t need a math degree to understand this.

We also have hands-on labs if you want to experience some of the things we will discuss in this course: kill a live container and watch the load balancer route things to another container, turn that 4-second query into 12 milliseconds indexing, and promote a database replica after a failure.

We also cover Interview Bytes, showing how each topic appears in a system design interview - the question shape, the strong answer, and the trap.

If you can use a terminal and have some degree of perseverance, you're ready to start.