Is this a video course?

No. This is an interactive, slide-based learning platform. Each lesson has rich text, animated diagrams, live code editors, and quizzes. You learn by reading, interacting, and doing, not by watching videos passively.

How long do I have access?

Forever. Both pricing tiers are one-time payments with lifetime access. This includes all current 766 lessons and any future content we add.

What level of experience do I need?

None. We start from absolute basics like 'What is latency?' and build up to distributed consensus protocols. The Foundation level assumes zero prior knowledge of system design.

How much does the system design course cost?

7.99 US dollars for lifetime access globally, or 499 Indian rupees for lifetime access in India. One-time payment, no subscription, no hidden fees. 11 lessons are free with no signup required.

What technologies are covered?

Everything from DNS and load balancers to Kubernetes, Kafka, distributed databases, consensus protocols, stream processing, security architecture, and observability. We cover principles and real-world implementations used at Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber, Stripe, and more.

Is this useful for system design interview preparation?

Yes. The lessons are structured around the exact topics asked in system design interviews at FAANG and top-tier companies. Interactive diagrams help you practice whiteboard-style explanations. Covers everything from URL shortener design to distributed payment systems.

How is this different from ByteByteGo or Educative?

766 interactive lessons (4x more than most competitors), 16 different diagram types that build step by step, real production examples from Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber, and Stripe, and lifetime access for a one-time payment of $7.99 instead of annual subscriptions costing 100 to 200 dollars per year.

Netflix runs active-active across three AWS regions at roughly 33% utilization each. One region fails. Why is 33% the target and not 50%?

With three regions, each survivor absorbs half the failed region's load, going from 33% to about 50%, which stays well within capacity, In a three-region setup, the failed region's 33% traffic splits between two survivors, adding about 16.5% each. Each survivor goes from 33% to roughly 50%, which is well within the safety margin. This is the N+1 capacity math at work.

DynamoDB Global Tables uses last-writer-wins for conflict resolution. Two users in different regions both decrement the same inventory counter from 1 to 0 within the replication window. What is the outcome?

One decrement is silently dropped, inventory reads 0, and both customers are charged for an item that was sold twice, Last-writer-wins resolves by timestamp. The later write overwrites the earlier one. Both regions saw inventory = 1 and decremented to 0. The earlier write is silently dropped. The result is one item, two charges, two unhappy customers. This is why inventory and financial data should use single-writer patterns.

After a region recovers from an outage, why is it dangerous to immediately route 100% of traffic back to it?

The region's caches are cold, causing a thundering herd of database queries that can trigger a secondary outage, A recovered region has cold caches (Redis, in-memory, CDN edge). Every request becomes a cache miss, sending 100x the normal load to the database tier. Google Cloud's 2019 us-east1 incident doubled in duration because the failback overwhelmed cold instances. The correct approach is a gradual canary: 10% per minute, monitoring SLOs at each step.

Active-Active Failover

Name: System Design Masterclass
Availability: InStock

in Reliability Resilience

This lesson is part of the full System Design Masterclass. Unlock it along with 765 other lessons for a one-time payment.

One-time payment. Lifetime access. No subscription.

Global

$19.99$7.99/lifetime

One-time payment via PayPal

Get Lifetime Access

Foundation lessons free, try before you buy

Founders price, locked for the first 10,000 customers

India Special

India

₹999₹499/lifetime

One-time via UPI, cards, or net banking

Get Lifetime Access

Foundation lessons free, try before you buy

Founders price, locked for the first 10,000 customers

“The interactive diagrams alone are worth way more than the price.”

Anish K., Senior Engineer at a Bengaluru startup

All 766 interactive lessons

Step-by-step animated diagrams

Live code editors with real execution

Quizzes with instant feedback

Completion certificates per level

Lifetime access, all future content included

The first 5 Foundation lessons are free, no payment needed. Try them now