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System Design For Beginners
New
17 students

System Design For Beginners

Ace system design interviews: scaling, databases, caching, and queues
Created byMumshad Mannambeth
Last updated 10/2026
English

What you'll learn

  • How to gather functional and non-functional requirements
  • Scaling, load balancing, caching, CDNs, and object storage
  • SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, replication, and sharding
  • Message queues, timeouts and retries, rate limiting, CAP theorem, and monitoring

Course content

5 sections • 48 lectures • 2h 40m total length

  • Course Introduction0:43
  • What is System Design, Actually?5:00
  • HLD vs LLD - Where This Course Lives2:07
  • Interview Byte: Answer at the Right Altitude1:10
  • Functional vs Non-Functional Requirements3:24
  • Requirements Before Boxes4:02
  • Interview Byte: The First Five Minutes1:07
  • Monolithic vs Microservices3:54
  • Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling3:23
  • Interview Byte: Why Not Just Buy a Bigger Server?0:58
  • How a Request Actually Travels3:57
  • Load Balancers5:55
  • Stateless vs Stateful6:18
  • Interview Byte: The Random-Logout Question1:05
  • Lab: Two Containers Behind a Load Balancer0:27

Requirements

  • No Prerequisites

Description

This is a no-nonsense system design course for absolute beginners. It focuses on building the thought process for system design: asking the right questions and designing things logically rather than memorizing answers.

The course builds a system around a photo-sharing app like Instagram for millions of users. Every lesson starts with some component breaking, whether the server dies, a query takes 4 seconds, or the server logs everyone out. It then covers the component that fixes it, and the new problem the newly added component creates. Across multiple lessons, you'll build the full foundation, all in plain language; you don't need a math degree to understand it.


Hands-on labs in this course will let you experience some of what the course discusses:

  • Kill a live container and watch the load balancer route traffic to another container

  • Turn that 4-second query into 12 milliseconds with indexing

  • Promote a database replica after a failure

  • Learn how each topic appears in a system design interview


Interview Bytes show how each topic appears in a system design interview: the question shape, the strong answer, and the trap.


Prerequisites

If you can use a terminal and have some degree of perseverance, you're ready to start.


Who this course is for:

  • Software developers with 0–3 years of experience who want to understand how large-scale applications are designed and built
  • Engineers preparing for their first system design interview who need a clear, structured starting point
  • Computer science students and bootcamp graduates who want to go beyond coding and learn how real systems fit together
  • Technical product managers and team leads who want to follow architecture discussions with confidence

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