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System Design Interview Complete Course
Table of Contents
🎯 Course Overview
This course is designed to prepare you for system design interviews at FAANG and top-tier companies. It covers the complete interview framework, key distributed systems concepts, and critical trade-offs — with memorizable scripts you can use in any interview.
What you'll learn:
- A step-by-step interview framework (20 steps, 5 phases)
- Core distributed systems concepts with FAANG Q&A
- Critical trade-offs every senior engineer must know
- Interview scripts you can memorize and adapt
📚 Module 1: Interview Basics
Master the foundational framework for approaching any system design problem.
- The Steps to Solve System Design Interviews
- Functional vs Non-Functional Requirements
- Back-of-the-Envelope Estimations
- Things to Avoid in System Design Interviews
📚 Module 2: Core Concepts Glossary
Master the 16 essential building blocks of distributed systems.
- Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
- Load Balancing
- Caching
- Data Partitioning (Sharding)
- Database Indexes
- Proxy Servers - Forward vs Reverse
- Redundancy & Replication
- SQL vs NoSQL
- CAP Theorem & PACELC
- Consistent Hashing
- Polling vs Long Polling vs WebSockets vs SSE
- Bloom Filters
- Quorum
- Leader and Follower Pattern
- Heartbeat - Failure Detection
- Checksum - Data Integrity
📚 Module 3: System Design Trade-offs
Master 21 critical trade-offs every senior engineer and interviewer cares about.
- Why Trade-offs Matter
- Strong vs Eventual Consistency
- Latency vs Throughput
- ACID vs BASE
- Read-Through vs Write-Through Cache
- Stream vs Batch Processing
- Load Balancer vs API Gateway
- API Gateway vs Direct Server Access
- API Gateway vs Reverse Proxy
- SQL vs NoSQL (Trade-off Focus)
- Primary-Replica vs Peer-to-Peer Replication
- Data Compression vs Deduplication
- Server-Side vs Client-Side Caching
- REST vs gRPC
- Polling vs Long Polling vs WebSockets vs Webhooks
- CDN vs Direct Server Serving
- Stateful vs Stateless Architecture
- Serverless vs Traditional Server-Based
- Hybrid Cloud vs All-Cloud Storage
- Read-Heavy vs Write-Heavy Systems
🚀 How to Use This Course
- Start with Module 1 — Internalize the 20-step interview framework
- Read Module 2 — Study each concept with the FAANG Q&A and scripts
- Practice Module 3 — For each trade-off, memorize the decision framework
- Mock interviews — Use the scripts verbatim in practice sessions
- Review — Days before your interview, re-read the golden lines and cheat sheets
💡 Interview Success Tips
"Every system design interview tests three things: your knowledge of distributed systems, your ability to communicate trade-offs, and how you handle ambiguity."
- Clarify scope first — Never assume, always ask
- Estimate early — Numbers justify your design choices
- Talk trade-offs — Every decision has a cost
- Engage the interviewer — Make it a collaboration
- Think out loud — Silence is your enemy