Read-Heavy Systems: URL Shortener, ID Generator, Key-Value Store
This course is the payoff of the whole System Design quarter: taking the method (Course 10.1) and the building blocks (Course 10.2) and composing them into complete, end-to-end de…
System Design Case Studies covers: Read-Heavy Systems, Feed and Timeline Systems, Real-Time Systems, Large-Scale Storage and Crawling, Transactional and Spatial Systems. Year 3, Quarter 10. Includes 9 exercises and 1 projects.
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This course is the payoff of the whole System Design quarter: taking the method (Course 10.1) and the building blocks (Course 10.2) and composing them into complete, end-to-end de…
"Show me the latest posts from everyone I follow" — the news feed — is one of the most-studied system-design problems, and it hides a genuinely hard question with no free answer: …
Most of the systems you've designed so far follow the request/response rhythm: a client asks, a server answers, the connection closes. Real-time systems break that rhythm — they n…
Two systems in this lesson operate at a scale that forces clever design: file storage (Google Drive, Dropbox — store and sync billions of files across billions of devices) and web…
The case studies so far have mostly been about scale — serving reads, distributing feeds, storing petabytes. This final family is about correctness under concurrency and space, an…
- [ ] Whiteboard: Design a Paste Bin — 15-minute quick design: API, storage, expiration, unique URLs
- [ ] Design a File Storage System (Google Drive) — AX Ch15 — Upload, sync, versioning, dedup, notifications - [ ] Design a Ticket Booking System — AX — Seat locking, double-booki…
- [ ] Design a Stock Exchange — AX Vol2 Ch13 — Order matching engine, FIFO queue, deterministic processing, low latency - [ ] Design a Distributed Message Queue — AX Vol2 Ch4 — Pa…
- [ ] Mock system design interviews (3 rounds) — Practice with a timer: 5 min requirements, 5 min estimation, 10 min high-level design, 15 min deep dive; record yourself, review a…
Write 3 complete system design documents (URL shortener, chat system, notification system) following the Alex Xu template: requirements, estimation, API design, data model, high-l…
- [ ] Walk through the design of a URL shortener: encoding, storage, caching, analytics. - [ ] Walk through the design of a chat system: WebSocket, presence, message storage, grou…
- [ ] Course 10.1 knowledge check passed - [ ] Course 10.2 knowledge check passed - [ ] Course 10.3 knowledge check passed - [ ] URL Shortener at Scale capstone completed
12 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.