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 biggest advantage of a shared database in a microservices environment?

Native SQL JOINs and ACID transactions across all data, with immediate consistency, A shared database gives you the same data access capabilities as a monolith. JOIN across any tables, wrap any combination of operations in a transaction, and get immediate consistency. These are hard (and sometimes impossible) to achieve with database-per-service.

When is a shared database most problematic?

When different teams need independent release cycles and one team's schema changes break another team's service, Schema coupling is the killer. When Team A changes a column and Team B's service breaks, independent deployment becomes impossible. The shared database forces teams to coordinate every schema change, slowing everyone down.

What is the recommended migration path from shared database to database-per-service?

Replace all cross-service direct table access with API calls first, then split the database when zero direct access remains, The strangler fig approach: eliminate direct cross-service queries one by one, replacing them with API calls. When no service directly accesses another's tables, the database splits cleanly. Splitting the database before eliminating direct access guarantees runtime errors.

Shared Database Pattern

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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