System Design Patterns: Building Scalable Distributed Systems
Stop memorizing architecture diagrams. Learn how to design scalable systems.
You know how to write code.
You know how to build APIS.
You know how to work with databases.
But when someone asks:
“How would you design this system for 10 million users?”
the problem suddenly becomes much bigger.
How do you handle millions of requests?
What happens when a service fails?
How do you prevent your database from becoming a bottleneck?
How do you handle millions of concurrent connections?
How do you maintain consistency across distributed services?
And most importantly…
Why did you choose one architecture over another?
That’s what this course is about.
Go Beyond Basic System Design
System Design is not about drawing boxes and arrows.
It’s about understanding the engineering problems behind those boxes.
In this course, you won’t simply memorize:
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“Use Kafka here.”
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“Use Redis there.”
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“Add a load balancer.”
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“Use sharding.”
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“Add a cache.”
Instead, you’ll learn to ask:
Why?
Why Kafka?
Why Redis?
Why a read replica?
Why sharding?
Why asynchronous communication?
Why a circuit breaker?
Why a distributed lock?
And most importantly:
What tradeoff are you making?
At scale, there is rarely a perfect solution.
Improving latency can increase cost.
Increasing availability can introduce consistency challenges.
Distributing data can make transactions harder.
Adding retries can amplify traffic during an outage.
Adding caching can introduce stale data and invalidation problems.
Understanding these tradeoffs is the heart of System Design.
What You’ll Learn
Throughout this course, you’ll explore the patterns and techniques that repeatedly appear in large-scale distributed systems.
Architecture & Tradeoffs
Learn how to reason about architecture decisions, scalability, latency, throughput, reliability, consistency, and cost.
Real-Time Communication
Understand:
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Polling
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Server-Sent Events
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WebSockets
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Service Discovery
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API Gateways
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Gossip Protocol
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Backpressure
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Sidecar Pattern
Database Internals
Go beyond simply knowing how to use a database.
Understand:
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B-Trees
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LSM-Trees
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Write-Ahead Logging
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Replication
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Partitioning
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Indexing
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Read Replicas
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Query Optimization
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EXPLAIN ANALYZE
Data Scaling
Learn how systems evolve when a single database is no longer enough.
Explore:
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Partitioning
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Horizontal Sharding
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Consistent Hashing
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Data Locality
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Denormalization
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Materialized Views
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CQRS
Reliability & Failure Handling
Learn how to prevent one failure from becoming a system-wide outage.
You’ll explore:
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Circuit Breakers
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Timeouts
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Retries
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Jitter
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Rate Limiting
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Bulkheads
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Load Shedding
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Graceful Degradation
Concurrency & Distributed Transactions
Understand what happens when multiple requests modify the same data at the same time.
You’ll learn:
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Race Conditions
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Atomic Operations
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Pessimistic Locking
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Optimistic Concurrency
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Distributed Locks
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Idempotency
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Two-Phase Commit
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Saga Pattern
Queues, Events & Asynchronous Systems
Learn how to build systems that can absorb traffic spikes and process work asynchronously.
Explore:
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Kafka
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Amazon SQS
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RabbitMQ
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Job Queues
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Visibility Timeouts
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Retry Policies
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Dead-Letter Queues
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Poison Messages
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Failure Handling
Event-Driven Architecture
Go deeper into modern distributed architectures with:
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CQRS
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Event Sourcing
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Change Data Capture
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Fan-Out
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Fan-In
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Workflow Orchestration
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Choreography
Specialized Distributed-System Patterns
You’ll also explore powerful patterns and data structures including:
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Leader Election
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Bloom Filters
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Merkle Trees
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Tombstones
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Read Repair
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Anti-Entropy
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Geohashing
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Spatial Indexing
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Top-K & Heavy Hitters
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Content-Addressable Storage
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CRDTs
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Strangler Fig Pattern
Learn Patterns Through Problems
This course does not teach patterns as isolated definitions.
For each important pattern, we’ll follow a practical learning approach:
PROBLEM
↓
PATTERN
↓
HOW IT WORKS
↓
TRADEOFFS
↓
WHEN TO USE IT
↓
WHEN NOT TO USE IT
↓
SYSTEM DESIGN INTERVIEW DISCUSSION
This approach helps you understand not only what a pattern is, but why it exists and when it makes sense.
Prepare for System Design Interviews
System Design interviews aren’t simply testing whether you remember the definition of sharding or Kafka.
They’re testing whether you can reason about a system.
Can you understand requirements?
Can you estimate scale?
Can you identify bottlenecks?
Can you reason about failures?
Can you choose appropriate architectural patterns?
Can you explain consistency requirements?
Can you understand the consequences of your decisions?
And when the interviewer changes a requirement…
Can you adapt your design?
This course is designed to help you build that way of thinking.
Who Is This Course For?
This course is designed for:
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Software developers preparing for System Design interviews
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Engineers targeting Senior, Staff, or Principal-level roles
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Developers who want to understand distributed systems more deeply
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Engineers working on scalable production systems
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Developers who know the basics of System Design and want to go deeper
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Anyone who wants to understand the patterns behind large-scale systems
Whether you’re preparing for interviews at companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Apple, or simply want to become better at designing production systems, this course is built to develop the reasoning skills required for complex System Design problems.
What Makes This Course Different?
This isn’t about memorizing hundreds of architecture diagrams.
It’s about developing the ability to look at a problem and ask:
What is the actual constraint?
Where is the bottleneck?
What happens when this component fails?
What consistency do we need?
Where should the data live?
Should this operation be synchronous or asynchronous?
What happens when traffic increases 10× or 100×?
What tradeoff am I making?
That is the mindset that allows you to design systems rather than simply reproduce someone else’s architecture.
By the End of This Course
You should be able to approach System Design problems with a much more structured mindset.
Instead of asking:
“What architecture should I memorize?”
you’ll be able to ask:
“What problem am I solving, what constraints matter, and which pattern best fits those constraints?”
Because the goal isn’t to memorize the instructor’s architecture.
The goal is to learn how to design your own.
Start Your System Design Journey
If you’re ready to move beyond basic System Design…
If you want to understand how scalable distributed systems are actually designed…
If you want to reason about failures, concurrency, data, scalability, reliability, and tradeoffs…
you’re in the right place.
Don’t memorize architectures.
Learn how to design them.
Enroll now and start building the System Design mindset.
