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System Design & Distributed Systems

Design and architect resilient, high-throughput distributed systems: consensus algorithms, consistent hashing, caching, rate limiters, partition strategies, and microsecond telemetry.

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1 · Foundations & Scalability

Horizontal scaling, back-of-the-envelope estimation, latency numbers and availability math.

  1. 1. Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling & Latency NumbersThe economics of scale-up vs scale-out, memory hierarchies, and the latency numbers every engineer should know.
    9m · 3 MCQs

2 · Distributed Core & Consensus

CAP/PACELC theorems, quorum slices, linearizability, and Raft/Paxos consensus.

  1. 2. The CAP & PACELC TheoremsConsistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance, and the latency trade-offs of healthy networks.
    10m · 3 MCQs
  2. 3. Distributed Consensus: Raft & PaxosLeader election, replicated state machines, log replication, and split-brain resolution.
    11m · 3 MCQs

3 · Partitioning & Data Stores

Consistent hashing, virtual nodes, LSM-trees vs B-Trees, replication and write-ahead logs.

  1. 4. Consistent Hashing & Data PartitioningHash rings, virtual nodes, data rebalancing, and horizontal database sharding.
    10m · 3 MCQs
  2. 5. Storage Engines: LSM-Trees vs B-TreesWrite amplification, sequential vs random I/O, SSTables, Bloom filters, and compaction.
    10m · 3 MCQs

4 · Performance & Fault Tolerance

Distributed caching, cache stampedes, token-bucket rate limiters, circuit breakers and idempotency.

  1. 6. Caching Strategies & Preventing Cache StampedesCache-Aside, Write-Through, Write-Back, Eviction policies, and the Thundering Herd.
    10m · 3 MCQs
  2. 7. Rate Limiting, Throttling & Circuit BreakersToken bucket, leaky bucket, sliding window counters, and cascading failure containment.
    10m · 3 MCQs

5 · Real-World Architectures

Event-driven pipelines, CQRS/Saga patterns, microsecond order books and large-scale case studies.

  1. 8. Asynchronous Messaging, Queues & Event StreamingPoint-to-point queues, publish-subscribe topics, Kafka log partitioning, and consumer groups.
    10m · 3 MCQs
  2. 9. Saga Pattern & Distributed TransactionsTwo-Phase Commit (2PC), Choreography vs Orchestration Sagas, and compensating transactions.
    10m · 3 MCQs
  3. 10. Designing a Real-World Scalable System: Live Case StudyHigh-throughput URL shortener, distributed newsfeed generation, and real-time payment gateways.
    12m · 3 MCQs

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