System Architecture

Master large-scale distributed system design: the fundamental building blocks — load balancers, caching, rate limiting, sharding, message queues, storage engines — and how they combine into resilient systems.

Each lesson opens with a concrete failure story, works through the core idea with real numbers, and ends with a quiz and a set of Anki cards. The through-line is the set of trade-offs every distributed system negotiates: latency, availability, consistency, durability.

Grounded in Alex Xu’s System Design Interview series (Vol 1 & 2) and ByteByteGo.