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 role of the sidecar proxy in a service mesh?

To intercept and handle all network traffic for its service: encryption, retries, load balancing, and metrics, transparently, The sidecar proxy sits next to the service and handles all networking concerns. Traffic flows through the proxy automatically, so the application code only handles business logic. Encryption, retries, circuit breaking, and metrics collection happen at the proxy layer.

When is a service mesh NOT worth the complexity?

When you have fewer than 10 services and the operational overhead of the mesh exceeds its benefits, A service mesh adds significant operational complexity: sidecar resource overhead, proxy debugging, version management. With fewer than 10 services, implementing retries and TLS per-service is simpler than managing a mesh.

What happens when the service mesh control plane goes down?

Proxies continue routing with last-known-good config, but new policy changes and cert rotations stop until the control plane recovers, Proxies cache the control plane's configuration. Traffic keeps flowing with existing rules. But new VirtualService changes, certificate rotations, and policy updates are paused until the control plane recovers. This is graceful degradation by design.

Service Mesh. Concepts

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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