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Bestseller Recently updated Web Development · System Design

The System Design Masterclass

Earn the architectural judgment that gets you to Staff+ and the room where the big calls happen.

3.9 (118 ratings) Created by Marcus Chen
Advanced 122 lessons 40h 10m Updated Jun 2026 English
Preview this course
₹199 ₹499 60% off
incl. GST
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What you'll learn

Design scalable, reliable distributed systems from first principles
Apply caching, load balancing, sharding, and replication effectively
Reason about consistency, availability, and CAP trade-offs
Architect data stores, queues, and APIs for high throughput
Estimate capacity and identify bottlenecks under load
Communicate designs clearly in interviews and on the job

This course includes

40h 10m of on-demand content
122 lessons across 29 sections
Access on mobile and desktop
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access
Curriculum

Course content

29 sections · 122 lessons · 40h 10m

What System Design Actually Means Preview 14 min
Scale Dimensions and the CAP Tradeoff Preview 18 min
Functional vs Non-Functional Requirements Preview 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

Requirements

  • Comfortable writing code in at least one language
  • Basic understanding of databases and networking
  • Familiarity with how web applications work end to end

Description

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

  1. Foundations of Distributed Systems — mental models, networking, and storage primitives.
  2. Core Distributed Systems — consensus, caching, and the messaging fabric.
  3. Cloud Native Architecture — microservices, Kubernetes, and platform engineering.
  4. Reliability Engineering — HA, observability, and security at scale.
  5. Data Intensive Systems — analytics, search, and recommendations.
  6. Real-World Case Studies — social, video, ride-share, payments, e-commerce.
  7. Advanced Engineering — multi-region, performance, and decision-making.
  8. Leadership & Staff+ Engineering — communicating system design in real orgs.
  9. 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.

Topics covered

system-design distributed-systems architecture scalability kubernetes
Your instructor
M

Marcus Chen

System Design & Distributed Systems · 14 yrs · Ex-Amazon, Staff Engineer

3.9 course rating 3 courses

Marcus has spent 14 years building the kind of distributed systems that quietly run the internet — order pipelines, multi-region data stores, and the boring-but-critical plumbing in between. He led capacity and reliability work on systems serving hundreds of millions of users at Amazon, and now teaches the trade-offs behind the diagrams, not just the diagrams themselves.

3.9 course rating · 118 ratings

N
Nona Streich
3 months ago

Outstanding course. The structure is fantastic and the instructor clearly knows the subject inside and out.

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M
Mr. Gonzalo Marks DDS
3 months ago

Genuinely transformative for my skills. I keep coming back to the lessons as a reference.

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M
Mr. Rickey Swaniawski V
2 months ago

A complete, well-thought-out course. I came in a beginner and finished feeling genuinely confident.

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Q
Quinn O'Keefe
4 months ago

Average. The instructor is clear, but a few more concrete examples would have helped a lot.

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  • Report this review

Frequently asked questions

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 7 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.

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