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.

Why do media pipelines use fan-out after the ingest stage?

So that independent processing stages (transcoding, thumbnails, captions) run in parallel and failures in one stage do not block others, Fan-out maximizes parallelism and isolates failures. Transcoding, thumbnail extraction, captioning, and content moderation are independent. Running them in parallel reduces wall-clock time. A failure in captioning does not prevent the video from being playable.

At what scale does self-hosted FFmpeg on Kubernetes typically become more cost-effective than a managed service like Mux?

Around 1,000+ uploads per day, when the per-minute savings offset the operational overhead of running your own infrastructure, Managed services charge a premium per minute of output. At low volume (100 uploads/day), the convenience is worth the premium. At 1,000+ uploads/day, self-hosted FFmpeg on spot instances with Kubernetes autoscaling costs significantly less per minute, and the operational overhead is justified.

What is a CDN shield and why is it important for media pipelines?

A mid-tier cache between CDN edge nodes and origin that absorbs redundant origin requests, preventing origin overload during traffic spikes, Without a shield, 200 CDN edge nodes might each request the same new segment from origin simultaneously. A shield is a single intermediate cache that serves all edge nodes, reducing origin requests from 200 to 1 for each new segment. This prevents origin overload during popular live events.

Why should media pipeline stages be idempotent?

So that re-running a failed stage produces the same output without duplicating artifacts or corrupting state, making retries safe, In a distributed pipeline, failures and retries are routine. If a transcoding worker crashes after writing 3 of 6 renditions and the job is retried, idempotency ensures the second run overwrites the partial output cleanly rather than creating duplicates or leaving the output in an inconsistent state.

Media Processing Pipeline

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.

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