System Design & Architecture Masterclass + Case Studies

Understand vertical scaling, upgrading a single server to handle more load with cost and limitations. Learn when to switch to horizontal scaling for bigger, distributed systems.

Explore horizontal scaling fundamentals, how stateless design enables scaling out with tokens, shared storage, and distributed caching; learn about auto-scaling, load balancing, fault tolerance, and geographic distribution.

Discover how load balancers orchestrate horizontal scaling by distributing requests, performing health checks, and enabling zero-downtime deployments. Learn layer 4 versus layer 7, session affinity, SSL termination, and strategic redundancy.

Learn how round-robin and weighted round-robin load balancing allocate traffic, adapt to heterogeneous servers, enable canary deployments, geographic optimization, and cost-efficient instance mixes.

Explore load-balancing algorithms, including least connections, IP hash, and consistent hashing, and see how they balance load while preserving sessions. Apply lessons to real-world cases like Netflix and GitHub.

Enable horizontal scaling and resilience by adopting stateless service design. Externalize user state to shared stores like Redis and JWTs.

Explore service discovery patterns for microservices, including client-side and server-side approaches, registries, kubernetes, dns and load balancers, plus blue-green deployments and istio.

Master the circuit breaker pattern to prevent cascade failures in distributed systems by failing fast and managing closed, open, and half-open states with timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and bulkheads.

Design a scalable url shortener like bit.ly to generate and redirect short urls, support customization and expiration, and provide analytics while optimizing caching, encoding, rate limiting, and geographic distribution.

Explore a practical api design for a url shortener, detailing endpoints for shorten, redirects, analytics, and bulk shorten, plus rate limiting, authentication, and versioning decisions.

Compare SQL and NoSQL trade-offs for a URL shortener and design a hybrid database using NoSQL for high-volume URL lookups while SQL handles user data and analytics.

Explore encoding strategies for short codes, from hashing and collision handling to counter-based base62 encoding, distributed IDs like Snowflake, and pregeneration, with custom URL handling and rate limits.

Scale a production url shortener with multi-level caching (browser, CDN, Redis), edge computing for redirects, distributed read/write paths across global regions, and streaming analytics with rate limiting to optimize performance.

Explore why SQL databases remain the backbone of many systems, harnessing ACID guarantees, complex queries, and mature tooling, while balancing scaling with read replicas, caching, and polyglot persistence.

Explore how NoSQL challenges traditional SQL by prioritizing availability and partition tolerance over strict consistency, introducing BASE and eventual consistency across document, key-value, column-family, and graph stores.

Explore document databases that store data as self-contained json documents, enabling flexible schemas, denormalization, and fast single-document queries with real-world use cases from MongoDB, Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix.

Explore key-value stores, the simplest and fastest databases, enabled by in-memory systems like Redis and DynamoDB, and learn how they power real-time sessions, caching, and leaderboards.

Explore column family stores like Cassandra and HBase, focusing on wide-column design, partition and clustering keys, tunable consistency, automatic repair, and real-world scale with Netflix, Discord, and IoT time-series data.

Explore graph databases as first-class relationships with nodes and edges, index-free adjacency, and real-time traversals powering social graphs, fraud detection, and recommendations.

Explore the cap theorem and how two of the three properties—consistency, availability, and partition tolerance—shape real-world distributed systems, with Netflix, DynamoDB, and SQL databases.

Explore strong and weak consistency models in distributed systems, from linearizability to monotonic reads, with real-world trade-offs and examples like banking, DynamoDB, and Netflix.

Explore the tradeoffs between strong and weak consistency in distributed systems, focusing on eventual, session, and weak models, their conflict resolution, and real-world examples like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Contrast acid and base philosophies to explain traditional databases versus distributed systems, highlighting when to prioritize consistency or availability and how hybrid designs apply in real-world architectures.

Explore database indexing basics, including b-tree and hash indexes, covering and partial and compound indexes, and proactive design to optimize reads and manage writes.

Master query optimization by examining execution plans, using indexes and statistics, and rewriting queries to avoid n plus 1, subqueries, and full table scans for large datasets.

Master-slave replication creates read replicas to absorb read traffic while routing writes to the master, using asynchronous replication and handling replication lag to scale read-heavy apps.

Explore master-master replication as an active-active, geographically distributed approach with dual masters, enabling local write latency but introducing conflict resolution challenges, strategies, and use cases.

Explore range-based, hash-based, and geographic sharding to balance query efficiency and load, with ranges for time or IDs, hash distribution, and regional data.

Explore federation and denormalization as scaling strategies that split databases by function and strategically duplicate data for performance. Learn trade-offs, use cases, and how to combine with sharding and replication.

Learn chunked, resumable photo uploads with initiate, chunk, and complete endpoints for reliable mobile performance. Process images asynchronously into multiple sizes while applying privacy safeguards and automated content moderation.

Explore how feed generation works at scale, comparing pull and push models, their trade-offs for freshness, storage, and fan-out, and how hybrid approaches balance performance and personalization.

Unveil hybrid feed generation blending push and pull models for scalable delivery. Leverage two-tier architecture, pre-computed feeds, high-follower caches, and real-time ranking to personalize feeds while gracefully handling traffic spikes.

Explore why Cassandra enables Instagram’s massive scale with a wide-column model and time-series data. Understand partition keys, replication, denormalization, and pre-computed feeds that support fast profile and feed queries.

Discover how strategic caching transforms modern system design by reducing database load and network latency. See how multi-level caches improve user experience, cut costs, and enable scalable architectures.

Explore the cache levels and hierarchy from browser caching through CDN and application and database caching, highlighting hit rates, invalidation, and cost trade-offs for scalable architectures.

Master the cache-aside pattern, the most common caching strategy, where the application manages the cache with lazy loading. It uses on-demand population, thundering herd mitigation, and write-through invalidation.

Explore write-through and write-behind caching, their latency and consistency trade-offs, and hybrid approaches, with examples from banking, gaming, and social platforms, plus monitoring and conflict resolution.

Master cache invalidation strategies by examining TTL, event-based, and tag-based approaches, plus cascading, lazy, and versioned invalidation, and learn when to use each strategy with monitoring.

Discover the Redis architecture, an in-memory data structure store for ultrafast caching, with strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, and hashes, atomic operations, memory efficiency, and future persistence and clustering.

Explore Redis persistence and clustering with consistent hashing and automatic failover, compare RDB snapshots and AOF for durability, and unlock real-time messaging with PubSub and pattern subscriptions.

Discover how modern cdns use intelligent routing, anycast, and tiered pops to optimize content delivery. Leverage origin shielding, edge computing, and multi-cdn strategies to boost reliability and reduce costs.

Learn how dynamic content acceleration uses esi and api acceleration to deliver personalized content at the edge, with region-specific caching and real-time invalidation.

Master video streaming optimization with adaptive bitrate, chunk-based delivery, and multi-quality levels powered by cdns using hls or dash for seamless playback across networks and devices.

Design YouTube at internet scale to handle 500 hours of uploads per minute, billions of viewing hours, real-time recommendations, transcoding, and global distribution.

Examine how YouTube's video upload system scales to millions of creators through geographic upload routing, concurrent processing, resume with chunk checksums, adaptive bandwidth, and robust failure recovery.

Analyze incoming video content to tailor encoding, thumbnails, and audio for global distribution, using ML-driven per-video optimization and parallel pipelines to balance quality, cost, and speed.

Discover how streaming platforms deliver smooth playback to billions of concurrent viewers with predictive buffering, edge-server segment prefetching, and multi-layer optimization for ultra-low latency live and adaptive on-demand video.

Explore how YouTube's recommendation system analyzes billions of user interactions to deliver real-time, personalized video suggestions through collaborative filtering, deep neural networks, and multi-stage ranking.