System Design Learning Path

System design is the craft of choosing trade-offs under real constraints: latency, durability, cost, and team topology. This pillar organizes existing Learning Lab articles into a coherent sequence so you build vocabulary first, then mechanisms, then production judgment—not a random inventory of interview questions.

Audience: Backend engineers preparing for design interviews or production architecture work.

Curriculum

1. SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets — Measure Reliability Like a Product
2. Capacity Planning for Backend Services
3. Tail Latency and Load Shedding — Surviving Peak Traffic Overload
4. Production-Readiness Reviews (PRRs)
5. System Design Foundations — How Large Software Fits Together
6. Availability — Nines, Error Budgets, and Redundancy
7. Reliability — Correct Results Under Stress
8. Scalability — Vertical, Horizontal, and Elastic Growth
9. Latency vs Throughput vs Bandwidth
10. CAP Theorem — Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance
11. Fault Tolerance — Keep Working When Parts Fail
12. Load Balancing — Algorithms and Layers
13. SQL vs NoSQL — Choosing a Data Store
14. Database Indexes — Find Rows Without Scanning Everything
15. Data Replication — Keeping Copies in Sync
16. Caching 101 — Memory Offloading and Latency Reduction
17. Message Queues — Hand Work Off Without Blocking the User

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

Shubham Jain · Learning Lab