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The Complete Backend System Design Guide
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New
66 students
The Complete Backend System Design Guide
Master system design, scalability, distributed systems, caching, databases, load balancing, and real-world architecture.
Created byCloud X Berry
Last updated 10/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Understand the core building blocks of backend system design and why each one exists
- Design a scalable backend for a real product, a video streaming platform, from a single server up
- Answer backend system design interview questions by reasoning from the problem to the architecture
- Evaluate any backend component by asking what happens when it's slow, when it's gone, how we'd know, and who can access it
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Course content
7 sections • 48 lectures • 2h 14m total length
Requirements
- No prior system design experience is needed. We start from a single server and build up.
- No coding is required. This is a concept course, not a hands-on build course.
- A basic idea of how websites and apps work from a user's point of view is enough.
- Some exposure to servers, APIs or databases helps, but everything is explained in plain English.
Description
Learn Backend System Design from Scratch!
How do real-world applications handle millions of users, serve content quickly, store enormous amounts of data, and stay reliable when individual components fail?
In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of backend system design and understand how the different parts of a modern backend work together. Instead of memorising architecture diagrams, you'll explore the reasoning behind design decisions through practical scenarios and a real-world streaming service case study.
Whether you're preparing for system design interviews or want to understand how production systems are built, this course will help you develop a solid foundation.
What You'll Learn
Scalability Fundamentals: Understand vertical and horizontal scaling, latency, throughput, availability, and capacity planning.
Request Routing and Traffic Management: Learn how DNS, load balancers, API gateways, CDNs, HTTP, WebSockets, and rate limiting work together.
Data Storage at Scale: Explore data modeling, relational and NoSQL databases, indexing, caching, replication, sharding, and object storage.
Distributed Systems: Understand the CAP theorem, eventual consistency, replication lag, and the trade-offs involved in distributed architectures.
Reliability and Fault Tolerance: Learn how message queues, background workers, idempotency, timeouts, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation help systems handle failures.
Security Fundamentals: Understand authentication, authorization, and the importance of protecting individual resources.
Production Readiness: Explore backups, observability, monitoring, alerting, and service discovery.
Real-World System Design: Bring these concepts together by examining how a video streaming service handles uploads, video processing, content delivery, caching, and failures.
Start learning backend system design and build the foundations for designing better software systems.
Who this course is for:
- Software engineers preparing for system design interviews
- Junior and mid-level backend engineers who want to understand why large systems are built the way they are
- Tech leads, engineering managers and product managers who need to follow architecture discussions
- Anyone who has wondered how apps like video streaming platforms handle millions of users