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.

Your Postgres warm standby shows 8 minutes of replication lag during peak hours but catches up overnight. The primary fails at 3 PM on a Tuesday. What happens during promotion?

The standby must replay 8 minutes of WAL before it can accept writes, extending the outage well past the expected 90-second RTO, A warm standby can only accept writes after draining its replay queue. Eight minutes of accumulated WAL on a busy OLTP workload can take 10 to 20 minutes to replay depending on I/O throughput. This is exactly the failure mode that caused Robinhood's 17-hour outage: the standby looked healthy but its replay backlog made promotion take far longer than expected.

An SRE skips the fencing step during a warm standby promotion because it seems to add unnecessary delay. The old primary comes back online 30 seconds later. What is the consequence?

Both instances accept writes simultaneously, creating conflicting data that requires manual reconciliation, Without fencing, the old primary has no way of knowing it has been replaced. If it recovers from whatever transient failure caused the failover, it will happily accept writes from any client that still has a cached connection or stale DNS. Split-brain with two active primaries is the single worst outcome in database operations because conflicting writes cannot be automatically merged.

Your payments database uses synchronous replication to a standby in another region. Write latency has increased from 3ms to 85ms. The product team demands you fix it without losing the zero-RPO guarantee. What is the correct approach?

Move the standby to the same region and use cross-AZ sync replication, which adds roughly 1ms instead of 80ms, Cross-region sync replication adds a full network round trip to every commit. Moving the standby to the same region but a different AZ keeps the zero-RPO guarantee while reducing the added latency to roughly 1ms of cross-AZ round trip. For cross-region DR, add a separate async replica. This is exactly how Aurora handles it: sync within a region, async across regions.

Warm Backup

Name: System Design Masterclass
Availability: InStock

in Reliability Resilience

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