System Design & Microservices Architecture
Design systems that stay up at scale — the exact skill senior-engineer interviews test. Work through scaling, caching, sharding, and the CAP trade-offs, then decompose a monolith into resilient microservices with API gateways, async messaging, and observability. Every module ends at a whiteboard-ready design for a real system (URL shortener, feed, chat, payments).
What You'll Learn
What's Included
Interactive learning path with AI-generated lessons read aloud by your personal tutor
Step-by-step lab instructions with AI guidance — run in your own IDE or sandbox.
AI interviewer asks tailored questions, gives real-time feedback and a score report
MCQ questions (theory, practical, code) to test your knowledge and earn a badge
Compete head-to-head against AI on real production problems — judged on correctness, performance, scalability, code quality, and edge cases
Course Syllabus
Module 1: System Design Fundamentals
- •Requirements: functional, non-functional, and scale estimation
- •Latency, throughput, availability, and back-of-envelope math
- •Vertical vs horizontal scaling and statelessness
- •Load balancing strategies and health checks
- •The system design interview framework
Module 2: Data at Scale
- •SQL vs NoSQL: choosing a data store by access pattern
- •Replication, leader/follower, and read scaling
- •Sharding and partitioning strategies
- •Caching patterns (cache-aside, write-through) and eviction
- •CDNs and edge caching for global reads
Module 3: Consistency & Reliability
- •CAP and PACELC trade-offs in real systems
- •Strong vs eventual consistency and quorums
- •Message queues, event streams, and the outbox pattern
- •Idempotency, exactly-once vs at-least-once delivery
- •Rate limiting, backpressure, and graceful degradation
Module 4: Microservices Architecture
- •Monolith vs microservices: when (and when not) to split
- •Domain-driven design and bounded contexts
- •Service decomposition and data ownership per service
- •API gateway, service discovery, and inter-service comms
- •Sync (REST/gRPC) vs async (events) communication
Module 5: Resilience, Observability & Design Practice
- •Retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- •Distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging
- •Saga pattern for distributed transactions
- •Deployment: containers, orchestration, and rollouts
- •Capstone: whiteboard a complete system end to end
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