System Design Roadmap
Master designing scalable distributed systems
About This Roadmap
System Design is a critical skill for senior software engineers, focusing on designing large-scale distributed systems that handle millions of users. This skill is essential for technical interviews at top tech companies and for architecting real-world systems. As you master system design, you will learn to design systems like URL shorteners, social media platforms, video streaming services, ride-sharing apps, and more. This comprehensive roadmap covers scalability principles, load balancing, caching strategies, database sharding, CAP theorem, microservices architecture, message queues, CDNs, and real-world system design case studies. System design knowledge is crucial for senior engineers, tech leads, and architects. The skill requires understanding of distributed systems, databases, networking, and the ability to make tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
Prerequisites
- Software development experience
- Understanding of databases
- Networking basics
- Data structures knowledge
What You'll Learn
Complete Learning Path
6-8 weeks
1Scalability
Horizontal vs vertical scaling, load balancing
2Availability
Redundancy, failover, disaster recovery
3Performance
Latency, throughput, bottlenecks
4Consistency
Strong, eventual, CAP theorem
8-10 weeks
1Load Balancers
Round robin, least connections, consistent hashing
2Caching
Redis, Memcached, cache strategies, CDN
3Databases
SQL vs NoSQL, sharding, replication, indexing
4Message Queues
Kafka, RabbitMQ, pub-sub, event streaming
8-10 weeks
1Distributed Systems
Consensus, Paxos, Raft, distributed transactions
2Microservices
Service decomposition, API gateway, service mesh
3Data Partitioning
Sharding strategies, consistent hashing
4Rate Limiting
Token bucket, leaky bucket, sliding window
10-12 weeks
1URL Shortener
Design bit.ly, hashing, database schema
2Social Media
Design Twitter, news feed, followers
3Video Streaming
Design Netflix, CDN, encoding, storage
4Ride Sharing
Design Uber, geolocation, matching, routing
8-10 weeks
1E-commerce
Design Amazon, inventory, payments, recommendations
2Messaging
Design WhatsApp, real-time messaging, encryption
3Search Engine
Design Google, crawling, indexing, ranking
4File Storage
Design Dropbox, file sync, deduplication
6-8 weeks
1Interview Framework
Requirements, estimation, design, deep dive
2Communication
Thinking aloud, asking questions, tradeoffs
3Practice Problems
LeetCode system design, mock interviews
4Common Mistakes
Avoiding pitfalls, time management
Tools & Technologies
Career Opportunities
- Senior Software Engineer
- Staff Engineer
- Principal Engineer
- Software Architect
- Tech Lead
- Engineering Manager