Awesome System Design Resources
February 16, 2026 · View on GitHub
This repository contains free resources to learn System Design concepts and prepare for interviews.
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✅ If you are new to System Design, start here: System Design was HARD until I Learned these 30 Concepts
⚙️ Core Concepts
- Scalability
- Availability
- Reliability
- SPOF
- Latency vs Throughput vs Bandwidth
- Consistent Hashing
- CAP Theorem
- Failover
- Fault Tolerance
🌐 Networking Fundamentals
- OSI Model
- IP Addresses
- Domain Name System (DNS)
- Proxy vs Reverse Proxy
- HTTP/HTTPS
- TCP vs UDP
- Load Balancing
- Checksums
🔌 API Fundamentals
🗄️ Database Fundamentals
- ACID Transactions
- SQL vs NoSQL
- Database Indexes
- Database Sharding
- Data Replication
- Database Scaling
- Databases Types
- Bloom Filters
- Database Architectures
⚡ Caching Fundamentals
- Caching 101
- Caching Strategies
- Cache Eviction Policies
- Distributed Caching
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
🔄 Asynchronous Communication
🧩 Distributed System and Microservices
- HeartBeats
- Service Discovery
- Consensus Algorithms
- Distributed Locking
- Gossip Protocol
- Circuit Breaker
- Disaster Recovery
- Distributed Tracing
🖇️ Architectural Patterns
- Client-Server Architecture
- Microservices Architecture
- Serverless Architecture
- Event-Driven Architecture
- Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Architecture
⚖️ System Design Tradeoffs
- Top 15 Tradeoffs
- Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
- Concurrency vs Parallelism
- Long Polling vs WebSockets
- Batch vs Stream Processing
- Stateful vs Stateless Design
- Strong vs Eventual Consistency
- Read-Through vs Write-Through Cache
- Push vs Pull Architecture
- REST vs RPC
- Synchronous vs. asynchronous communications
- Latency vs Throughput
✅ How to Answer a System Design Interview Problem
💻 System Design Interview Problems
Easy
- Design URL Shortener like TinyURL
- Design Autocomplete for Search Engines
- Design Load Balancer
- Design Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Design Parking Garage
- Design Vending Machine
- Design Distributed Key-Value Store
- Design Distributed Cache
- Design Authentication System
- Design Unified Payments Interface (UPI)
Medium
- Design WhatsApp
- Design Spotify
- Design Instagram
- Design Notification Service
- Design Distributed Job Scheduler
- Design Tinder
- Design Facebook
- Design Twitter
- Design Reddit
- Design Netflix
- Design Youtube
- Design Google Search
- Design E-commerce Store like Amazon
- Design TikTok
- Design Shopify
- Design Airbnb
- Design Rate Limiter
- Design Distributed Message Queue like Kafka
- Design Flight Booking System
- Design Online Code Editor
- Design an Analytics Platform (Metrics & Logging)
- Design Payment System
- Design a Digital Wallet
Hard
- Design Location Based Service like Yelp
- Design Uber
- Design Food Delivery App like Doordash
- Design Google Docs
- Design Google Maps
- Design Zoom
- Design File Sharing System like Dropbox
- Design Ticket Booking System like BookMyShow
- Design Distributed Web Crawler
- Design Code Deployment System
- Design Distributed Cloud Storage like S3
- Design Distributed Locking Service
📇 Courses
📩 Newsletters
📚 Books
📺 YouTube Channels
- Tech Dummies Narendra L
- Gaurav Sen
- codeKarle
- ByteByteGo
- System Design Interview
- sudoCODE
- Success in Tech
📜 Must-Read Engineering Articles
- How Discord stores trillions of messages
- Building In-Video Search at Netflix
- How Canva scaled Media uploads from Zero to 50 Million per Day
- How Airbnb avoids double payments in a Distributed Payments System
- Stripe’s payments APIs - The first 10 years
- Real time messaging at Slack
🗞️ Must-Read Distributed Systems Papers
- Paxos: The Part-Time Parliament
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
- The Google File System
- Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
- Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing
- Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database
- Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
- ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
- The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree)
- The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems
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