Everything you need to master system design from first principles. Modular chapters covering scalability, databases, caching, and more — the system design interview primer written by engineers, for engineers.
Performance vs scalability, latency vs throughput, and the fundamentals of building systems that grow.
CAP theorem, consistency patterns, fail-over strategies, and replication trade-offs.
How domain resolution works, record types, and how CDNs push content closer to users.
Layer 4 vs Layer 7, routing algorithms, horizontal scaling, and reverse proxies.
RDBMS vs NoSQL, ACID vs BASE, replication, sharding, federation, and denormalization.
Cache layers, eviction policies, write strategies, and cache invalidation patterns.
Message queues, task queues, back pressure, and event-driven architecture.
HTTP, TCP, UDP, RPC vs REST, and choosing the right protocol for the job.
Encryption, input validation, principle of least privilege, and defense in depth.