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 primary advantage of a monolithic architecture for small teams?

It's simpler to develop, deploy, and debug because everything is in one place, Monoliths shine for small teams because of simplicity: one codebase, one deployment, one debugger session. All components communicate via in-process function calls (nanoseconds) rather than network calls (milliseconds). The other options are actually advantages of microservices.

Why did Amazon transition from monolith to microservices?

The tangled codebase made deployments so painful that it slowed down organizational velocity, Amazon's monolith didn't fail because of performance, it failed because of organizational friction. Deploying changes required full-day merge sessions across teams. The monolith was a bottleneck for team productivity, not system performance. This is the most common real reason companies decompose monoliths.

Shopify handles $200B+ in annual commerce. What architecture do they use?

A modular monolith, one application with strict internal module boundaries, Shopify deliberately chose to keep and improve their monolith rather than decompose it. They invested in modularization, enforcing clear boundaries between components within the monolith. This gives them many benefits of service boundaries without the operational complexity of distributed systems.

Monolithic Architecture

Name: System Design Masterclass
Availability: InStock

in Microservices Architecture

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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Foundation lessons free, try before you buy

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

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All 766 interactive lessons

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