Anmol Barik
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System Design

System Design Roadmap

A comprehensive 13-week learning path to master system design concepts, from fundamentals to advanced distributed systems.

Why Learn System Design?

System Design is a critical skill for building large-scale applications and services. Here's why you should follow this roadmap:

  • Essential for designing scalable and reliable applications
  • Critical for senior and architect-level engineering roles
  • Key component of technical interviews at top tech companies
  • Helps understand trade-offs in complex distributed systems
  • Enables you to make informed architectural decisions

Learning Roadmap

Follow this structured 13-week roadmap to master system design concepts from fundamentals to advanced topics.

Phase 1: Foundations
Week 1-2
Basics of scalability, availability, and reliability

Basic Concepts

  • What is System Design?
  • Vertical vs. Horizontal Scaling
  • Load Balancer
  • Caching
  • CDN
  • Proxy vs Reverse Proxy

Study Resources

  • Grokking the System Design Interview (educative.io)
  • YouTube: Tech Dummies Narayan or Gaurav Sen
Phase 2: Core Components
Week 3-5
Learn how real systems work

Database Design

  • SQL vs NoSQL
  • Indexing
  • Partitioning & Sharding
  • CAP Theorem

Caching

  • Redis, Memcached
  • Cache Eviction Policies (LRU, LFU)
  • Cache Invalidation

Load Balancing

  • Round Robin, Least Connections
  • Health Checks

Messaging Systems

  • Kafka, RabbitMQ
  • Message Queues vs Pub/Sub

Data Storage & File Systems

  • Blob Storage (S3, GCS)
  • Block vs Object Storage
Phase 3: Design Patterns & Principles
Week 6-7
Learn architectural patterns for scalable systems

Architecture Patterns

  • Microservices vs Monolith
  • API Gateway
  • Circuit Breaker, Rate Limiter, Retry Logic
  • Service Discovery (Eureka, Consul)
  • Event-driven architecture
  • CQRS & Event Sourcing
Phase 4: Design Real-world Systems
Week 8-10
Apply knowledge to practical system designs

Pick and design

  • URL Shortener (e.g., TinyURL)
  • Rate Limiter (Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket)
  • Chat App (e.g., WhatsApp)
  • YouTube/Netflix
  • Instagram/Twitter feed
  • Uber/Google Maps (GPS + real-time systems)
  • Notification System

Use these while designing

  • High-level architecture diagram
  • APIs
  • DB Schema
  • Scaling strategy
  • Caching strategy
  • Failure handling
Phase 5: Advanced Topics
Week 11-13
Master complex distributed systems concepts

Advanced Concepts

  • Distributed Systems (Zookeeper, Raft, Paxos)
  • Consistency Models (Strong vs Eventual)
  • Leader Election
  • CRDTs, Bloom Filters
  • Websockets vs Long Polling vs SSE
  • GraphQL vs REST
  • Security: OAuth2, JWT, TLS, API Keys

Learning Resources

Grokking the System Design Interview
Visit Resource
Designing Data-Intensive Applications – Martin Kleppmann (book)
Visit Resource

Bonus Tips

  • Consistency is key: Spend 1–1.5 hours a day.

  • Mock interviews: Practice with peers or online platforms.

  • Draw architecture diagrams in every problem.

  • Keep a Notion doc or Google Doc for your designs and notes.