System Design Fundamentals
Learn the core building blocks of scalable systems (load balancing, caching, databases, APIs) in a beginner-friendly, text-based course. From the creators of Grokking the System Design Interview.
Course Overview
System Design Fundamentals is an introductory course for software engineers and developers who are new to designing large-scale systems. It teaches the core components, concepts, and mental models needed to build scalable, highly available software from the ground up: the client-server model, load balancing, caching, databases, messaging, and more. It covers all the basics you should know before moving on to more complex topics. When you are ready to prepare for the interview, continue with our flagship course, Grokking the System Design Interview, which builds directly on the foundation you develop here. The course uses a clear, beginner-friendly approach with illustrations, analogies, and real-world examples that make each concept easy to grasp. Complex ideas like latency and throughput are explained in plain, everyday language, with no heavy jargon and no prior design experience required. Multiple quizzes reinforce what you learn as you go. By the end, you will have a firm grasp of the fundamentals, the confidence to design basic scalable systems, and everything you need to take on interview-level design challenges.
What you'll learn in System Design Fundamentals
- Master the core building blocks of scalable systems: load balancing, caching, CDNs, and databases.
- Estimate QPS, storage, and bandwidth with back-of-the-envelope math before you design anything.
- Learn how database indexes work, from B-tree internals to LSM trees and distributed indexes.
- Use the CAP and PACELC theorems to reason about consistency and availability trade-offs.
- Protect systems with rate limiting, authentication, authorization, OAuth vs. JWT, and encryption.
- Reinforce every chapter with flashcards and an adaptive assessment, then take a final course quiz.
- Understand how the web works, from DNS and TCP to what happens when you type a URL into the browser.
- Compare SQL and NoSQL databases and understand ACID vs. BASE, normalization, and federation.
- Scale data with partitioning, sharding, redundancy, and replication, and know their trade-offs.
- Build real-time features with long-polling, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events.
- Learn distributed patterns like quorum, heartbeat, and Bloom filters, plus messaging with Kafka.
- Build the foundation you need before taking Grokking the System Design Interview.
Course Content
System Design Fundamentals
Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation
Network Essentials
Long-Polling vs. WebSockets vs. Server-Sent Events
Domain Name System (DNS)
Proxies
Load Balancing
API Gateway
Rate Limiting and Throttling
Caching
CDN
Data Partitioning
Redundancy and Replication
CAP & PACELC Theorems
Databases (SQL vs. NoSQL)
Indexes
Bloom Filters
Quorum
Leader and Follower
Heartbeat
Checksum
Distributed Messaging System
Distributed File Systems
Security
Misc Concepts
Final Quiz
What people say about our courses
About the Author
Arslan Ahmad
Industry Expertise & Leadership
Arslan Ahmad is the lead author of System Design Fundamentals. As the founder of Design Gurus and a former FAANG hiring manager, he has worked at industry giants like Facebook (now Meta) and Microsoft.
He has conducted hundreds of system design interviews, giving him unique insight into what top tech companies look for in candidates.
The course also incorporates expertise from senior engineers at Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber, ensuring you learn system design best practices from professionals who have built and scaled real-world systems.
500+
Interviews Conducted
10k+
Students Taught
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FAQs
Are there any prerequisites for System Design Fundamentals?
No, there are no strict prerequisites; this course is designed to be beginner-friendly. It starts with the basics of system design, so as long as you have basic programming knowledge, you can easily follow along and learn system design fundamentals from scratch.
Is this course text-based or video-based?
The course content is delivered entirely through text-based lessons (no video lectures). This format lets you read and learn at your own pace, with clear explanations and more than 150 diagrams to help you understand each concept.
How long does it take to complete this fundamentals course?
The course has about 20 hours of content across 27 chapters, but since it is self-paced, you can take as long as you need to finish. Many learners complete it in a few weeks by studying a bit each day, while others spread it out over a couple of months; the timing is completely up to you.
Does this course include quizzes or practice exercises?
Yes. Every chapter ends with a flashcards review and an adaptive chapter assessment, and the course finishes with a final quiz drawn from a question bank covering every chapter, so you can test yourself on each topic before moving on.
Will System Design Fundamentals help me prepare for system design interviews?
Absolutely, this course builds the foundation that system design interviews test: load balancing, caching, data partitioning, replication, and the CAP theorem, plus interview skills like back-of-the-envelope estimation. Once you finish, Grokking the System Design Interview is the recommended next step.
Is this the same course as Grokking System Design Fundamentals?
Yes. We renamed the course to System Design Fundamentals; the content and your progress are unchanged.
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