The Essential Foundations
of System Design.
Before building skyscrapers, you must lay the foundations. This phase teaches you the vocabulary and key concepts so you are never lost when discussing "Latency", "Scaling", or "Microservices".
What you will unlock
- Master technical vocabulary (Latency, Throughput, ACID...)
- Know how to choose between Scale Up and Scale Out
- Understand why Stateless is king in the Cloud
- Identify when to use async to save performance
Phase 1 Curriculum
Follow the lessons in order for optimal progression.
What is a Distributed System?
Simple definition, motivations, concrete examples (Netflix, clusters), and initial problems (latency, failures).
Vertical vs Horizontal Scalability
Scale up vs scale out: pros, cons, numerical examples, and how to discuss them in interviews.
Latency vs Throughput
Understanding the two key performance metrics and the trade-offs between speed and processing capacity.
Stateless vs Stateful
Why we love stateless services and how to externalize state (cache, database, session store).
Sync vs Async
Difference between blocking and non-blocking calls, queues, workers, and when to switch to asynchronous.
Monolith vs Microservices
The great debate. Comparing the three major approaches and knowing which to choose based on context.
Ready for the next step?
Once the basics are mastered, we tackle the big topic: how to handle millions of users.