System Design Fundamentals: Build Scalable Systems with Vivek Kushwaha

Learn system design from the ground up through a structured, text-only learning experience designed to help you understand how scalable, reliable, and maintainable software systems are built.

This course takes you from the fundamental building blocks of modern software architecture to real-world system design. No videos are required. You can learn at your own pace through carefully structured written lessons, architecture explanations, examples, and practical design scenarios.

You’ll start with the foundations of system design, including functional and non-functional requirements, capacity estimation, traffic calculations, latency, throughput, availability, and scalability. From there, you’ll explore the core components used in modern systems, including APIs, DNS, load balancers, CDNs, caches, databases, message queues, object storage, and distributed services.

The course covers essential database concepts such as SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, replication, partitioning, sharding, transactions, and consistency. You’ll also learn caching strategies, asynchronous processing, event-driven architecture, messaging patterns, and distributed system concepts such as CAP theorem, consistency models, fault tolerance, and distributed coordination.

You’ll learn how to design systems for reliability using retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, rate limiting, backpressure, graceful degradation, high availability, and disaster recovery. The course also introduces security, observability, monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, deployment strategies, and multi-region architecture.

Practical system design examples help you apply the concepts to systems such as URL shorteners, rate limiters, notification systems, chat applications, file storage, video streaming, social feeds, search systems, ride-sharing, payment systems, ticket booking, and e-commerce platforms.

The course also includes a practical framework for approaching system design interviews, helping you structure requirements, estimate scale, design architecture, identify bottlenecks, and explain trade-offs clearly.

By the end, you’ll have a structured mental model for breaking down complex systems and making informed architectural decisions as systems grow.

Format: 100% text-based. Learn at your own pace, revisit concepts anytime, and use the course as a long-term system design reference.