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 service has an HTTP client timeout of 10 seconds but no explicit TCP connect timeout set. The remote host becomes unreachable. What happens on Linux?

The request hangs for up to 127 seconds because the TCP connect timeout is the real bottleneck, The default TCP connect timeout on Linux is 127 seconds. The HTTP client timeout only starts counting after the TCP connection is established. During a network outage where the host is unreachable, the connect timeout dominates.

A request chain goes: API gateway (20s SLO) -> Service A -> Service B -> Database. Service A takes 2 seconds of processing. What is the maximum timeout Service A should pass to Service B?

18 seconds, subtracting its own processing time from the remaining budget, Deadline propagation requires each service to subtract its own processing time and pass the remaining budget downstream. Service A used 2 of the 20 seconds, so Service B gets at most 18 seconds (in practice less, to leave slack for network latency).

Why does gRPC use absolute deadlines instead of relative timeouts?

Absolute deadlines let each service know exactly how much time remains regardless of how much has already elapsed, A relative timeout of 10 seconds tells a downstream service nothing about how much of that 10 seconds has already been consumed by upstream processing and network latency. An absolute deadline of 14:32:17 UTC tells every service in the chain exactly when to stop, regardless of where it sits.

Netflix Hystrix defaulted every call to a 1 second timeout. What was the reasoning?

Their interactive p99 budget was 200ms and 1 second gave 5x headroom for retries, Netflix targeted a 200ms p99 for interactive requests. A 1 second timeout gave enough room for the occasional retry while still failing fast enough to prevent thread pool exhaustion.

Timeout Patterns

Name: System Design Masterclass
Availability: InStock

in Reliability Resilience

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