System Design Foundations
The building blocks of scalable systems — load balancing, caching, queues, partitioning, and the reliability work around them.
Intermediate1h 37m4 modules14.8k students
What you’ll learn
Assemble the building blocks
Know what load balancers, caches, and queues each solve, and what they cost you.
Scale the data layer
Partition and replicate data, and reason clearly about the consistency you gave up.
Design resilient APIs
Handle retries, idempotency, and rate limiting so failures do not compound.
Estimate capacity
Do the arithmetic that turns a hand-wavy design into a defensible one.