System Design Roadmap

Design software systems that handle millions of users. Learn the patterns, trade-offs, and architectures used by the biggest platforms.

4 stages · 16 topics 0% done
System Design
✓ CAP Theorem
✓ Latency & Throughput
✓ Fundamentals
✓ Load Balancing
✓ SQL Databases
✓ Storage
✓ NoSQL Databases
✓ Caching
✓ Microservices
✓ Message Queues
✓ Architecture
✓ Consensus
✓ URL Shortener
✓ Design Practice
✓ Chat System
✓ Video Platform
Text version of this roadmap

1. Fundamentals

  • CAP Theorem: Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance
  • Latency & Throughput: Metrics, bottlenecks, caching
  • Load Balancing: Round-robin, consistent hashing, layers

2. Storage

  • SQL Databases: ACID, indexes, replication, sharding
  • NoSQL Databases: Document, key-value, wide-column, graph
  • Caching: Redis, CDN, write-through/write-behind

3. Architecture

  • Microservices: Service decomposition, communication, data
  • Message Queues: Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, pub/sub
  • Consensus: Raft, Paxos, ZooKeeper, etcd

4. Design Practice

  • URL Shortener: Key generation, redirects, analytics
  • Chat System: WebSockets, presence, history, scaling
  • Video Platform: Upload, transcoding, CDN, recommendations