System Design

Curriculum

1. Section 1

   Requirements & Capacity

   Separate behavior from quality targets, turn user counts into peak load with visible assumptions, and write SLOs whose error budgets you can compute.

   1. 1Functional vs Quality Requirements
   2. 2Back-of-envelope Capacity
   3. 3Service-level Objectives

2. Section 2

   Data & Cache

   Pick stores from access patterns, run cache-aside with honest invalidation, and assign consistency contracts operation by operation.

   1. 1Storage by Access Pattern
   2. 2Cache-aside
   3. 3Consistency Tradeoffs

3. Section 3

   Reliability & Decisions

   Bound retries with deadlines and idempotency keys, trip breakers on evidence, and record decisions so their reasoning survives.

Learning paths