System Design Deep Dive: Real-World Distributed Systems*

Explore how large-scale systems come to life, master the trade-offs behind smart architecture, learn how top tech builds reliable services, and gain the confidence to design your own.

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424 Lessons

Certificate of Completion

Explore how large-scale systems come to life, master the trade-offs behind smart architecture, learn how top tech builds reliable services, and gain the confidence to design your own.

AI-POWERED

Mock Interview

Explanations

AI-POWERED

Mock Interview

Explanations

Course Overview

This course takes you inside the world of large-scale systems and how they’re built to consistently meet demanding service-level agreements (SLAs). You’ll uncover the key concepts that shape modern System Design, learn how different components work together, and understand the trade-offs that drive every architectural decision. You’ll dive into real designs from industry leaders like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, exploring timeless principles that power some of the world’s most reliable systems. These idea...Show More

Course Content

File Systems

Beyond Local Storage

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Visualizing the Bottleneck

The Centralized Master

Hitting the Ceiling

The Distributed Solution

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Why Evolve?

DFS Evolution Recap

Google Colossus File System

The GFS Bottleneck

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Colossus Architecture

Shared Storage Illusion

Why Bigtable Matters

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Metadata Scale Check

Colossus in a Nutshell

Facebook's Tectonic File System

The Specialization Trap

Paxos for Consistency

Tectonic Architecture

The Multitenancy Challenge

Databases

Google Bigtable

17 Lessons

Google Megastore

13 Lessons

Google Spanner

19 Lessons

Key-value Stores

8 Lessons

10.

Many-core Key-value Store

13 Lessons

11.

Scaling Memcache

18 Lessons

14.

Concurrency Management

9 Lessons

15.

Two-phase Locking (2PL)

11 Lessons

16.

Google Chubby Locking Service

19 Lessons

17.

ZooKeeper

18 Lessons

18.

Big Data Processing: Batch to Stream Processing

8 Lessons

19.

MapReduce

18 Lessons

21.

Kafka

15 Lessons

22.

Consensus

8 Lessons

23.

Understanding Consensus: Two Generals, FLP, & Byzantine Generals

12 Lessons

24.

Two-phase Commit

10 Lessons

26.

Paxos

18 Lessons

Trusted by 1.4 million developers working at companies

Anthony Walker

@_webarchitect_

Evan Dunbar

ML Engineer

Carlos Matias La Borde

Software Developer

Souvik Kundu

Front-end Developer

Vinay Krishnaiah

Software Developer

Eric Downs

Musician/Entrepeneur

Kenan Eyvazov

DevOps Engineer

Souvik Kundu

Front-end Developer

Eric Downs

Musician/Entrepeneur

Anthony Walker

@_webarchitect_

Evan Dunbar

ML Engineer

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Personalized Interview Prep

Skip the LeetCode grind with a custom roadmap that adapts to your goals. Hands-on practice for Coding Interviews, System Design, and more.

Mock Interviews

Test your skills in a simulated interview setting. Receive personalized feedback based on your performance. Available for Coding Interviews, System Design, and more.

AI Prompt

Build prompt engineering skills. Practice implementing AI-informed solutions.

Code Feedback

Evaluate and debug your code with the click of a button. Get real-time feedback on test cases, including time and space complexity of your solutions.

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AI Code Mentor

AI Code Mentor helps you quickly identify errors in your code, learn from your mistakes, and nudge you in the right direction — just like a 1:1 tutor!