System Design for Beginners: Build Scalable Backend Systems

Learn the fundamentals of the internet protocol suite, from DNS and ports in the application layer to TCP vs UDP, IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, ICANN, and firewalls securing networks.

Explore essential application layer protocols, including HTTP basics, request-response semantics, headers, methods, statuses, and real-time updates with WebSockets, SMTP, MQTT, and AMQP.

Design api basics to best practices. Explore crud operations, rest, graphql, and grpc, with data formats like json and protobuf, plus versioning, rate limits, and cors.

Explore caching and content delivery networks to reduce latency for distant users, covering browser and server caches, cache-control headers, eviction policies, and CDN pull and push strategies.

Discover how proxy servers mediate between clients and servers, enabling caching, anonymity, and load balancing through forward and reverse proxy designs.

Explore load balancing strategies and algorithms, from round robin and least connections to IP hashing and consistent hashing, and learn how health checks and redundancy prevent single points of failure.

Explore relational and NoSQL databases, including acid properties, sharding, replication, and performance techniques like caching, indexing, and query optimization, while considering vertical and horizontal scaling and the CAP theorem.

Explore how sql databases, a type of relational database management system, organize data in tables, use primary and foreign keys, perform joins, and optimize queries with indexes.

Explore SQL transactions and the acid properties—atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability—with begin, commit, and rollback to keep balances correct. Review isolation levels from read uncommitted to serializable and related anomalies.

Explore NoSQL databases, including document stores, key-value stores, wide column stores, and graphs, and learn how flexible schemas, horizontal scaling, and eventual consistency shape modern data architectures.

Replication creates replicas across servers for high availability and read scaling, with leader-follower or leader-leader setups and synchronous or asynchronous propagation, while sharding distributes data across shards with shard keys.

Learn how object storage, including blob storage, handles massive unstructured data with services like AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage, emphasizing unique object identifiers, metadata, and fast, scalable access.

Learn how signed URLs and signed cookies grant time-limited access to specific objects or entire directories in cloud storage, using private keys, public keys, and signatures to verify access.

Explore how MapReduce processes terabytes of logs with map and reduce phases, delivering parallelism, scalability, and fault tolerance for batch data analysis.

Explore how message queues decouple producers and consumers to process events asynchronously, offering durable, scalable queues with first in, first out, priority options, and push or pull models.

Explore a high-level system design for Spotify, focusing on 500k users and 30m songs, storage estimates, and a scalable backend with SQL metadata, blob storage, and CDN caching.

Design a scalable url shortener like tinyurl, focusing on high availability, low latency, seven-character alphanumeric keys, caching, and sharded replicated databases with create and redirect APIs and security.

Design a scalable messaging backend like WhatsApp, focusing on 1-to-1 text messages, RESTful APIs, WebSocket chat servers, and asynchronous queues, with sharding, NoSQL storage, and end-to-end encryption considerations.

design a twitter-like app with follow, tweets up to 280 chars, for you and following feeds, and a read-heavy, scalable architecture with caches, object storage, and a CDN.

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