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 core advantage of ESI over full server-side rendering?

ESI caches the static parts of a page at the CDN edge and only fetches dynamic fragments from origin, reducing origin load and latency, ESI splits a page into cached static fragments and uncached dynamic fragments. The edge serves most of the page from cache and only calls origin for the dynamic parts, saving 50-300 ms compared to full SSR on most requests.

Why might edge functions (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge) replace ESI in modern architectures?

Edge functions execute arbitrary JavaScript at the edge, enabling auth checks, A/B tests, and complex logic that ESI tags cannot express, ESI is limited to fragment inclusion with basic conditional logic. Edge functions run full JavaScript/WASM, enabling any computation at the edge. This subsumes ESI's capabilities while adding authentication, routing, personalization, and more.

What security risk does ESI introduce?

ESI tags can be injected by attackers to fetch internal URLs or perform SSRF through the CDN, If user input influences ESI include URLs, an attacker can inject esi:include tags that fetch internal resources through the CDN's trusted network. This is SSRF at the CDN layer and was documented by Akamai in 2018.

Edge-Side Includes (ESI)

Name: System Design Masterclass
Availability: InStock

in Web Content Delivery

This lesson is part of the full System Design Masterclass. Unlock it along with 765 other lessons for a one-time payment.

One-time payment. Lifetime access. No subscription.

Global

$19.99$7.99/lifetime

One-time payment via PayPal

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Foundation lessons free, try before you buy

Founders price, locked for the first 10,000 customers

India Special

India

₹999₹499/lifetime

One-time via UPI, cards, or net banking

Get Lifetime Access

Foundation lessons free, try before you buy

Founders price, locked for the first 10,000 customers

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

Anish K., Senior Engineer at a Bengaluru startup

All 766 interactive lessons

Step-by-step animated diagrams

Live code editors with real execution

Quizzes with instant feedback

Completion certificates per level

Lifetime access, all future content included

The first 5 Foundation lessons are free, no payment needed. Try them now