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  2. System Design Fundamentals
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System Design Fundamentals

The building blocks of system design interviews and real distributed systems: scaling, load balancing, caching, data partitioning, consistency models and event-driven architecture. Every concept is presented as a trade-off, because that is how it is actually assessed.

Engineering
AShared by Alex Chen
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Suggested order

Arrows point from what to learn first. Topics side by side can be studied in any order — and cloning the deck brings this order with it.

Topics

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Scaling Fundamentals & Statelessness
Vertical and horizontal scaling, what statelessness buys you, and the estimation habits that make the rest of system design tractable.
MCQ: 9
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
38 total questions
Load Balancing & Health Checks
Balancing algorithms, layer 4 versus layer 7, and how health checking keeps a pool honest — including how a careless health check can take down an entire fleet.
MCQ: 9
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
38 total questions
Caching, CDNs & Invalidation
Caching strategies and their failure modes — stampedes, penetration, eviction policies — plus what a CDN does and does not help with.
MCQ: 9
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
Locked · 38 questions inside
Replication, Partitioning & Sharding
How data is copied and split across machines: leader-follower and quorum replication, replication lag, and choosing a partition key that does not create a hot shard.
MCQ: 9
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
Locked · 38 questions inside
CAP, PACELC & Consistency Models
What the CAP theorem actually says, why 'pick two of three' is a misreading, and the ladder of consistency guarantees from linearizable down to eventual.
MCQ: 15
Fill-in: 12
Flashcards: 20
Pair match: 16
Locked · 63 questions inside
Message Queues, Pub/Sub & Event-Driven Design
Queues and topics, delivery semantics and why exactly-once is subtler than it sounds, plus dead-letter queues, ordering and backpressure.
MCQ: 9
Fill-in: 7
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
Locked · 38 questions inside
Rate Limiting, Load Shedding & Graceful Degradation
How a system protects itself when demand exceeds what it can serve: limiting algorithms, circuit breakers, retry discipline, deadlines and shedding features instead of availability.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 8
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
Locked · 40 questions inside
Monoliths, Microservices & Service Boundaries
Where to draw service boundaries and what each choice costs: monoliths, modular monoliths, microservices, data ownership, sagas, gateways, meshes and incremental migration.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 8
Flashcards: 13
Pair match: 10
Locked · 41 questions inside
Designing the Classic Systems
The design questions that come up by name: URL shortener, news feed, chat, unique id generation, typeahead, pagination and large uploads — and the trade-off each one is really testing.
MCQ: 10
Fill-in: 8
Flashcards: 12
Pair match: 10
Locked · 40 questions inside
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