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.

A team runs nightly full backups of a 2 TB PostgreSQL database. Restoring from S3 takes 3 hours. Their RTO target is 30 minutes. What should they change?

Switch to continuous WAL archiving with point in time recovery, The bottleneck is restore time, not backup frequency or storage class. Continuous WAL archiving lets the standby replay writes in near real time, so failover happens in seconds rather than hours. Compression might shave minutes off a 3-hour restore but cannot get it under 30 minutes.

GitLab's 2017 database incident lost 6 hours of production data despite having 5 backup mechanisms configured. Which principle did they violate?

They never tested whether any of the backups actually worked, All five mechanisms were configured but none had been verified with a real restore test. pg_dump had silently failed weeks earlier. LVM snapshots were never enabled. The core failure was the absence of regular restore drills, not a technology choice.

The 3-2-1 rule requires one copy off site. In a modern cloud setup, which implementation satisfies this requirement?

A cross-account S3 copy in a different region with Object Lock enabled, Cross-account, cross-region with Object Lock satisfies the off-site requirement and adds ransomware protection. Same-region copies share the blast radius of a regional outage. Same-account copies can be deleted by a compromised credential.

Why do incremental backups have a longer RTO than differential backups for the same dataset?

Incremental restores require replaying every backup in the chain since the last full, while differentials only need the last full plus one diff, An incremental restore must replay the full backup plus every subsequent incremental in order. A differential restore only needs the full plus the single latest differential. Fewer steps means faster recovery and fewer points where a corrupted file can break the chain.

Backup Strategies Overview

Name: System Design Masterclass
Availability: InStock

in Reliability Resilience

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