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.

What is the key difference between a connection timeout and a request timeout?

Connection timeout covers establishing the connection; request timeout covers waiting for the response after the connection is established, Connection timeout measures how long to wait for the TCP handshake to complete (is the server reachable?). Request timeout measures how long to wait for the server's response once you're already connected. Both are set by the client.

Service A (timeout: 10s) calls Service B (timeout: 12s to Service C). What's wrong with this setup?

Service B's timeout exceeds Service A's, so B might still be waiting for C after A has already given up and moved on, If Service B waits 12 seconds for Service C, but Service A already timed out and disconnected at 10 seconds, Service B is wasting resources on a response nobody will ever read. Each downstream timeout should be shorter than the upstream timeout, typically 70-80% of the caller's timeout.

A service is overloaded and responding slowly. Your client times out and retries immediately. 500 other clients do the same. What happens next?

The retries double the load on an already struggling service, making it even slower, a retry storm, Immediate retries from hundreds of clients create a thundering herd that doubles (or triples) the load on a service that's already struggling. This is a retry storm, one of the most common causes of prolonged outages. The fix is exponential backoff with jitter: wait progressively longer between retries, with randomization to spread the load.

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Name: System Design Masterclass
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in Core Fundamentals

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

Anish K., Senior Engineer at a Bengaluru startup

All 766 interactive lessons

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Quizzes with instant feedback

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