Web Development · System Design
System Design Mastery
Design the systems that run the internet.
Advanced
122 lessons
40h 10m
D
Daniel Thompson
What you'll learn
Introduction to Modern System Design
Networking Fundamentals for Architects
Data Storage Fundamentals
Distributed Systems Theory
Scalability Architecture
Caching Systems
What's inside
Course includes
Everything you get the moment you enroll.
Lifetime access
Re-watch and revisit forever.
Downloadable resources
Code, slides, and worksheets.
Mobile + desktop
Learn from any device.
Certificate of completion
Add it to your LinkedIn.
Hands-on labs
Practice as you learn.
Real-world capstones
Ship something portfolio-worthy.
The details
At a glance
- Last updated
- May 2026
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Duration
- 40h 10m
- Categories
- Web Development, System Design
About this course
Overview
What you'll learn
A rigorous, end-to-end system design course built for senior engineers, architects, and Staff+ aspirants. Foundations to real-world case studies, with the tradeoffs explained — not just the diagrams.
The 9 parts
- Foundations of Distributed Systems — mental models, networking, and storage primitives.
- Core Distributed Systems — consensus, caching, and the messaging fabric.
- Cloud Native Architecture — microservices, Kubernetes, and platform engineering.
- Reliability Engineering — HA, observability, and security at scale.
- Data Intensive Systems — analytics, search, and recommendations.
- Real-World Case Studies — social, video, ride-share, payments, e-commerce.
- Advanced Engineering — multi-region, performance, and decision-making.
- Leadership & Staff+ Engineering — communicating system design in real orgs.
- Capstone Projects — three full end-to-end designs.
Who this is for
Engineers preparing for senior+ interviews, tech leads owning architectural decisions, and anyone tired of system-design content that draws boxes without naming the constraints behind them.
Curriculum
What you'll work through
29 sections · 122 lessons · 40h 10m
Scale Dimensions and the CAP Tradeoff
18 min
Functional vs Non-Functional Requirements
12 min
Throughput, Latency, Durability, Availability
16 min
Designing the Evolution of a Startup: 1K → 100M Users
22 min
TCP/IP, HTTP Versions, and the Modern Web
20 min
Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, and CDNs
18 min
DNS Internals and TLS Handshakes
16 min
QUIC, HTTP/3, and Tail Latency
15 min
Case Study: A Cloudflare-Style CDN
22 min
B-Trees vs LSM Trees: The Two Storage Engines That Run the World
22 min
Replication, WAL, and Durability Guarantees
20 min
ACID, MVCC, and Isolation Levels
18 min
Sharding Fundamentals and Hot Partitions
16 min
Choosing a Database: Relational, KV, Columnar, Time-Series, Graph
20 min
Why Distributed Consensus Is Hard
18 min
Paxos, Practically Explained
20 min
Raft Deep Dive
22 min
Gossip Protocols and Failure Detection
16 min
Lamport and Vector Clocks
14 min
Lab: Build a Mini Raft Cluster
60 min
Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
12 min
Stateless Services and Service Discovery
16 min
Partitioning Strategies and Hot Partitions
20 min
Consistent Hashing in Depth
18 min
Backpressure and Load Shedding
16 min
The Cache Hierarchy: CPU → App → Distributed → Edge
16 min
Invalidation Strategies and Write Policies
18 min
Redis and Memcached Internals
20 min
Cache Stampede Prevention
14 min
Bloom Filters and TinyLFU
16 min
Queues vs Streams vs Logs
16 min
Kafka Internals: Partitions, Leaders, ISR
22 min
Exactly-Once Semantics in Practice
18 min
Event Sourcing and CQRS
20 min
Watermarks and Out-of-Order Events
16 min
Lab: Real-Time Analytics Pipeline
60 min
Service Decomposition with DDD
20 min
gRPC vs REST vs GraphQL
16 min
Service Mesh and Sidecars
18 min
Saga Pattern for Distributed Transactions
22 min
Conway's Law and Bounded Contexts
14 min
Containers from Kernel Primitives
18 min
Kubernetes Architecture: Control Plane & Data Plane
22 min
Scheduling Internals
16 min
Stateful Workloads and Operators
20 min
Autoscaling and Cost Optimization
18 min
Terraform Architecture and State
18 min
GitOps and Declarative Delivery
16 min
Blue-Green and Canary Rollouts
20 min
Feature Flags and Progressive Delivery
16 min
High Availability Architecture
18 min
Circuit Breakers, Retries, and Idempotency
20 min
Bulkheads and Failure Isolation
16 min
Chaos Engineering in Production
18 min
SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets
16 min
Logs, Metrics, Traces: The Three Pillars
18 min
OpenTelemetry End-to-End
20 min
Cardinality Explosion and Sampling
16 min
Alerting Without Burning Out the Team
16 min
Lab: Build a Tracing Pipeline
60 min
Authentication and Authorization Patterns
20 min
OAuth2 and OpenID Connect
18 min
Zero Trust Architecture
16 min
Encryption at Rest and In Transit
16 min
Supply Chain and Runtime Security
18 min
OLTP vs OLAP
14 min
Data Lakes, Warehouses, Lakehouses
18 min
Batch vs Stream Processing
20 min
Spark, Flink, Iceberg, Delta
22 min
Information Retrieval Fundamentals
18 min
Inverted Indexes Explained
16 min
Distributed Search and Sharding
20 min
Vector Databases and ANN Indexes
18 min
Hybrid Retrieval and Semantic Search
16 min
Collaborative Filtering and Embeddings
20 min
Candidate Generation and Ranking
18 min
Real-Time Personalization
16 min
Feature Stores and Online Inference
20 min
Fanout-on-Write vs Fanout-on-Read
20 min
Timeline Ranking
18 min
Notification Systems
16 min
Presence Systems and Online State
16 min
Video Transcoding Pipelines
20 min
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
18 min
Global CDN Delivery
16 min
Live Streaming Architecture
20 min
Geospatial Indexing
18 min
Real-Time Driver Matching
20 min
ETA and Surge Pricing
16 min
Double-Entry Bookkeeping
16 min
Idempotent Payment Flows
20 min
Fraud Detection Systems
18 min
Reconciliation and Settlement
16 min
Inventory Systems and Reservations
20 min
Order Orchestration
18 min
Distributed Checkout
16 min
Pricing Engines at Scale
16 min
Active-Active Architectures
20 min
Cross-Region Replication
18 min
Conflict Resolution and CRDTs
20 min
Latency-Aware Routing
16 min
Profiling Production Systems
20 min
CPU and Memory Bottlenecks
18 min
GC Tuning at Scale
16 min
Tail Latency Reduction
20 min
Build vs Buy Decisions
16 min
Complexity Budgeting
14 min
Architecture Review Process
18 min
Managing Technical Debt
16 min
Platform Teams and Internal Developer Platforms
20 min
RFC Culture
16 min
Architecture Councils and Governance
18 min
Whiteboarding Like a Staff Engineer
18 min
Writing Architecture Documents and ADRs
16 min
Executive Communication
14 min
Requirements and Capacity Planning
30 min
End-to-End Architecture
45 min
Requirements and Conflict Resolution
30 min
End-to-End Architecture
45 min
Requirements and Durability Math
30 min
End-to-End Architecture
45 min
D
Your instructor
Daniel Thompson
Author & instructor
Creates rigorous, project-based courses that prioritize shipping over watching. Reach out with feedback once you finish — that loop is half the value.
Common questions
Frequently asked
Yes — once you enroll, the course is yours to revisit forever. New revisions and bonus lessons are added at no extra cost.
Finish every lesson and you'll unlock a shareable certificate you can post on LinkedIn or include with job applications.
If the course isn't a fit, request a refund within 3 days of purchase — no questions asked.
Code, slides, and worksheets are downloadable on each lesson page. Videos stream from our CDN so you can watch on any device.
Each course states its level in the hero. If you're comfortable with the prerequisites listed, you're ready to start.