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.

Why must the old primary be fenced before promoting the replica?

To prevent split brain where two nodes accept writes to the same data, Without fencing, a network partition can cause the old primary to come back and accept writes while the new primary is also accepting writes. Two divergent copies of the same data is split brain, and reconciliation is often impossible.

What is the key difference between RDS Multi-AZ and Aurora for failover?

Both target RPO = 0, but Aurora achieves RTO of ~30 seconds vs RDS Multi-AZ at 60-120 seconds, RDS Multi-AZ uses synchronous replication for RPO = 0 with RTO of 60-120 seconds. Aurora uses a distributed storage layer with 4/6 quorum writes for RPO = 0 and faster promotion at approximately 30 seconds RTO.

In GitHub's October 2018 database incident, the replica promotion took seconds. What consumed the remaining 24 hours?

Rebuilding the old primary from a base backup and manually reconciling divergent writes, The partition lasted 43 seconds and promotion was fast. The bulk of the 24 hours was spent rebuilding the old primary and reconciling data that diverged during the partition. GitHub chose data integrity over speed.

How does Patroni prevent split brain in a self-managed Postgres cluster?

By holding a leader lease in etcd that the primary must renew before it expires, Patroni uses etcd leader leases with a 30 second default TTL. The primary must renew the lease every 10 seconds. If the lease expires (due to partition or failure), the primary demotes itself. This is self-fencing via consensus.

Database 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.

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