No hand-waving. No buzzword bingo. Each topic explained the way a real architect would walk a junior engineer through it on a whiteboard, with diagrams, trade-offs, and real-world examples.
Concepts stack on top of each other. By the end you can design Twitter or WhatsApp from scratch.
Every concept comes with a hand-drawn architecture diagram. See it before you read the words.
Senior engineers do not say "use X". They say "use X if Y, else Z". Every decision is contextual.
End with case studies that walk through real interview questions step by step.
Read in order or jump to whichever topic you need.
The mental model and vocabulary of system design. Start here.
How services talk to each other over the wire.
Where the data lives. SQL, NoSQL, indexes, sharding, replication.
+1 more topics →Vertical, horizontal, load balancers, CDNs, reverse proxies.
How to make things fast by not doing them.
Decouple services with queues, pub/sub, event streams.
Splitting big apps into independently deployable services.
Surviving failure. Throttling, retries, idempotency, HA.
Authentication, authorization, OAuth, JWT, API security.
Logs, metrics, traces. You can not fix what you can not see.
Apply everything. Walk through real system design problems end to end.