Awesome System Design Resources

This repository contains free resources to learn System Design concepts and prepare for interviews.

👉 Subscribe to my AlgoMaster Newsletter and get a FREE System Design Interview Handbook in your inbox.

✅ If you are new to System Design, start here: System Design was HARD until I Learned these 30 Concepts

⚙️ Core Concepts

• Scalability
• Availability
• Reliability
• SPOF
• Latency vs Throughput vs Bandwidth
• Consistent Hashing
• CAP Theorem
• Failover
• Fault Tolerance

🌐 Networking Fundamentals

• OSI Model
• IP Addresses
• Domain Name System (DNS)
• Proxy vs Reverse Proxy
• HTTP/HTTPS
• TCP vs UDP
• Load Balancing
• Checksums

🔌 API Fundamentals

• APIs
• API Gateway
• REST vs GraphQL
• WebSockets
• Webhooks
• Idempotency
• Rate limiting
• API Design

🗄️ Database Fundamentals

• ACID Transactions
• SQL vs NoSQL
• Database Indexes
• Database Sharding
• Data Replication
• Database Scaling
• Databases Types
• Bloom Filters
• Database Architectures

⚡ Caching Fundamentals

• Caching 101
• Caching Strategies
• Cache Eviction Policies
• Distributed Caching
• Content Delivery Network (CDN)

🔄 Asynchronous Communication

• Pub/Sub
• Message Queues
• Change Data Capture (CDC)

🧩 Distributed System and Microservices

• HeartBeats
• Service Discovery
• Consensus Algorithms
• Distributed Locking
• Gossip Protocol
• Circuit Breaker
• Disaster Recovery
• Distributed Tracing

🖇️ Architectural Patterns

• Client-Server Architecture
• Microservices Architecture
• Serverless Architecture
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Architecture

⚖️ System Design Tradeoffs

• Top 15 Tradeoffs
• Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
• Concurrency vs Parallelism
• Long Polling vs WebSockets
• Batch vs Stream Processing
• Stateful vs Stateless Design
• Strong vs Eventual Consistency
• Read-Through vs Write-Through Cache
• Push vs Pull Architecture
• REST vs RPC
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communications
• Latency vs Throughput

✅ How to Answer a System Design Interview Problem

💻 System Design Interview Problems

Easy

• Design URL Shortener like TinyURL
• Design Autocomplete for Search Engines
• Design Load Balancer
• Design Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Design Parking Garage
• Design Vending Machine
• Design Distributed Key-Value Store
• Design Distributed Cache
• Design Authentication System
• Design Unified Payments Interface (UPI)

  Medium

• Design WhatsApp
• Design Spotify
• Design Instagram
• Design Notification Service
• Design Distributed Job Scheduler
• Design Tinder
• Design Facebook
• Design Twitter
• Design Reddit
• Design Netflix
• Design Youtube
• Design Google Search
• Design E-commerce Store like Amazon
• Design TikTok
• Design Shopify
• Design Airbnb
• Design Rate Limiter
• Design Distributed Message Queue like Kafka
• Design Flight Booking System
• Design Online Code Editor
• Design an Analytics Platform (Metrics & Logging)
• Design Payment System
• Design a Digital Wallet

  Hard

• Design Location Based Service like Yelp
• Design Uber
• Design Food Delivery App like Doordash
• Design Google Docs
• Design Google Maps
• Design Zoom
• Design File Sharing System like Dropbox
• Design Ticket Booking System like BookMyShow
• Design Distributed Web Crawler
• Design Code Deployment System
• Design Distributed Cloud Storage like S3
• Design Distributed Locking Service

📇 Courses

• System Design Fundamentals
• System Design Interviews

📩 Newsletters

• AlgoMaster Newsletter

📚 Books

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications

📺 YouTube Channels

• Tech Dummies Narendra L
• Gaurav Sen
• codeKarle
• ByteByteGo
• System Design Interview
• sudoCODE
• Success in Tech

📜 Must-Read Engineering Articles

• How Discord stores trillions of messages
• Building In-Video Search at Netflix
• How Canva scaled Media uploads from Zero to 50 Million per Day
• How Airbnb avoids double payments in a Distributed Payments System
• Stripe’s payments APIs - The first 10 years
• Real time messaging at Slack

🗞️ Must-Read Distributed Systems Papers

• Paxos: The Part-Time Parliament
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
• The Google File System
• Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
• Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing
• Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
• The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree)
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems

---

If you find this resource helpful, please give it a star ⭐️ and share it with others!