Hired in GUIDED STUDY / 18 LESSONS
System design
Practice architecture decisions, scale, and reliability.
Lessons
Design a URL Shortener
Start with create and redirect.
The 45-Minute Design Framework
Try an example plan, then adapt it to the actual interview.
Rate Limiter: Token Bucket
Burst capacity and refill rate solve different problems.
Caching: Hits, Misses and Stale Data
A fast copy still needs a freshness plan.
Chat Message Delivery
Chat delivery needs more than a live connection.
Consistent Hashing
Follow the ring clockwise to the key's owner.
Load Balancers
A load balancer routes requests. It doesn't create capacity.
Database Sharding
Choose the key, route the work, and plan for growth.
CAP: The Partition Trade-Off
CAP is a partition trade-off.
Back-of-the-Envelope Math
Estimate the work before picking servers.
Docker vs Virtual Machines
Where does the kernel live?
What Kubernetes Does
Declare the desired state, then watch controllers work toward it.
CI/CD Pipeline
CI/CD is a chain of checks, not a magic tunnel to production.
Blue-Green and Canary Deployments
Two rollout patterns. Different ways to control exposure.
Logs, Metrics and Traces
One slow request. Three useful views of what happened.
CDN
A CDN can serve a cached response without another trip to your origin.
Serverless Still Has Servers
Managed compute. Your design.
Scale Up or Scale Out?
Bigger box or more boxes?