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 makes Cilium fundamentally different from Istio and Linkerd?

Cilium uses eBPF to implement networking at the kernel level instead of userspace sidecar proxies, resulting in lower overhead, Istio and Linkerd deploy sidecar proxy containers alongside every application. Cilium uses eBPF programs in the Linux kernel to handle networking, bypassing the sidecar entirely for L3/L4 operations. This eliminates the per-pod resource overhead and reduces latency.

What is the recommended approach for rolling out a service mesh?

Start with one namespace, enable core features (mTLS, metrics), verify, then expand gradually, Gradual rollout is critical. Start small, verify that services communicate correctly through the mesh, catch configuration issues early, then expand. A big-bang rollout risks breaking all service-to-service communication simultaneously.

Why did Netflix move from their library-based approach (Ribbon, Hystrix) to considering a sidecar-based mesh?

Libraries were language-specific, and maintaining parity across Java, Go, and Python implementations became unsustainable, Netflix's Java libraries (Ribbon, Hystrix, Eureka) worked well for their Java services. But when teams started writing Go and Python services, they needed to reimplement everything in each language. A sidecar proxy is language-agnostic: one implementation serves all languages.

Service Mesh. Implementation

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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India

₹999₹499/lifetime

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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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