System Design Academy
All at one place, free guide to ace your next distributed system design interview & become a better engineer.
table of contents
master making better architecture and design decisions for scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available systems.
I'm aiming to have it finished by the end of Dec 2025. Meanwhile, some of the content is already published, check it out. Travis, Avinash & 1340+ others on the waitlist. Stay tuned @systemdesignHQ for early access and updates. Any suggestions? I'm sitting behind systemdesignacademy@gmail.com
Fundamentals of System Design
This section is a quick intro to the basic fundamental concepts of designing distributed systems. These tiny essays will help you better understand the critical concepts of system design.
What is a system design?
Availability
Fault tolerance
Consistency
Concurrency
Clock and time in distributed systems
Retry, timeout and backoff strategies
Networking
A basic intro to core components
Service Discovery & Heartbeats
Estimation & Back-of-envelope calculations
Architectural Patterns
Essential architectural patterns and design principles that form the backbone of scalable distributed systems.
Monolithic vs Microservices
Event-Driven Architecture
Resilience Patterns
Migration Patterns
Fundamentals of Databases
This section discusses the fundamental concepts of database engineering that every software engineer must be aware of.
Database Transactions
Scaling Databases
Database is a hypercritical component of any application to scale. In this section, we will be leveling up our knowledge by understanding various database scaling concepts.
Database Indexing
Database Locking
Database Locking
Database Tuning & Optimizations
Database Replication
Database Partitioning
Designing Database Schema
Internals of Databases
In this advanced section, we will talk about the interesting internals of databases to deeply understand the inner beauty of various databases.
Storage Engine Internals
Query Processing
MySQL Internals
Data Storages
In this section, we will deep dive & discuss various data storages (databases), their internals and which one to choose, as per the use case.
SQL Databases
NoSQL Databases
Specialized Databases
Data Warehouses & Analytics
Message Queues & Communication
Understanding asynchronous communication patterns and message-driven architectures essential for building scalable distributed systems.
Message Queue Fundamentals
Popular Message Queue Systems
Message Processing Patterns
Caching Strategies
Deep dive into caching patterns, strategies, and technologies that are crucial for building high-performance systems.
Caching Fundamentals
Caching Patterns
Cache Technologies
Load Balancing & Traffic Management
Comprehensive coverage of load balancing strategies, algorithms, and traffic management techniques for distributed systems.
Load Balancing Fundamentals
Load Balancing Algorithms
Health Checks & Failover
Advanced Traffic Management
Distributed Systems Advanced
Advanced distributed systems concepts including consensus algorithms, distributed transactions, and coordination patterns.
Consensus Algorithms
Distributed Transactions
Coordination & Synchronization
Performance Engineering
Performance optimization techniques, profiling, and scaling strategies for high-performance distributed systems.
Performance Fundamentals
Application Performance
Database Performance
Modern Infrastructure & DevOps
Modern infrastructure patterns, containerization, orchestration, and DevOps practices for scalable systems.
Containerization
Cloud Architecture
Deployment Strategies
Security & Authentication
Essential security concepts and authentication mechanisms for building secure distributed systems.
Authentication & Authorization
API Security
Security Patterns
Monitoring & Observability
Comprehensive monitoring, logging, and observability strategies for maintaining healthy distributed systems.