Distributed Systems Learning Path

Distributed systems fail in partial and surprising ways. This path moves from consistency vocabulary through replication and coordination into practical messaging and multi-region concerns, using the catalog’s existing deep dives rather than shallow summaries.

Audience: Backend engineers owning multi-service or multi-region systems.

Curriculum

1. System Design Foundations — The Core Building Blocks
2. CAP Theorem
3. CAP, Consistency & Idempotency
4. Consistency Models — From Strong to Eventual
5. Strong vs Eventual Consistency
6. Data Replication
7. Quorum Reads vs Quorum Writes
8. Distributed Locks & Consensus — Coordination Toolkit
9. Transactional Outbox & Saga Patterns
10. Exactly-Once Processing vs Practical Deduplication
11. Idempotency for APIs — Safe Retries Without Double Side Effects
12. Message Queues
13. Multi-Region Failover — Surviving a Region Outage
14. Active-Active Conflict Resolution

By Shubham Jain. Last reviewed 2026-07-15.

Shubham Jain · Learning Lab