System Design Interview
Alex Xu provides a 4-step framework for tackling system design interviews, featuring 16 real interview questions with detailed solutions and 188 diagrams explaining how different systems work. The book covers essential designs from URL shorteners to scalable platforms like YouTube and Google Drive, including back-of-the-envelope estimations and fundamentals like sharding, load balancing, and caching. Written by an experienced engineer from Twitter, Apple, and Zynga, it helps candidates master what are widely considered the most difficult technical interview questions.
11 sections ยท 35 lessons
Course outline
Scaling Fundamentals
- Server-Database Separation
- Load Balancers & Stateless
- Caching & CDNs
- Power of Two
- Latency & Storage
- Scaling Fundamentals
Interview Framework
- Clarify Requirements
- Design & Deep Dive
- Interview Framework
Traffic Management
- Token Bucket Algorithm
- Window-Based Rate Limiting
- Load Balancing Algorithms
- Traffic Management
Data Distribution
- Consistent Hashing
- Virtual Nodes
- Database Replication
- Database Sharding
- Data Distribution
Storage Systems
- SQL vs NoSQL
- Key-Value Stores
- CAP Theorem
- Distributed ID Generation
- Storage Systems
Caching
- Cache-Aside & Read-Through
- Write-Through & Write-Behind
- Caching
Common Patterns
- URL Shortener Design
- Web Crawler Politeness
- Multi-Channel Notifications
- News Feed Fan-Out
- Common Patterns
Real-Time Communication
- WebSocket Chat
- Chat Storage & Groups
- Autocomplete Trie
- Real-Time Communication
Media Systems
- Video Upload & Transcoding
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
- File Chunking & Sync
- Metadata & Conflicts
- Media Systems
Asynchronous Processing
- Message Queue Benefits
- Delivery Guarantees & DLQs
- Asynchronous Processing
Architecture Patterns
- Stateless Architecture Principles
- When Stateful Works
- Architecture Patterns