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Start Here

Everything on this site is organised into six pillars. You don't need to read everything — start with what matters most to you right now, or follow the recommended beginner path below.

How this site is organised

  • 1. Six pillars cover the full breadth of system design and cloud architecture.
  • 2. Each pillar has five topics in a deliberate reading order.
  • 3. Topics with a filled dot (●) have a published article. Empty topics are coming soon.
  • 4. Articles link to the next and previous topic so you stay in context.

Recommended first reads

1

What is System Design

Fundamentals of System Design

12 min

All six pillars

01

Fundamentals of System Design

Core concepts every engineer must understand before going deeper.

View path →
  • 01 What is System Design 12 min
  • 02 Client–Server Architecture & Request Flow Soon
  • 03 Latency vs Throughput Soon
  • 04 Availability vs Reliability vs Durability Soon
  • 05 Scalability Basics (Vertical vs Horizontal) Soon
  • 06 Consistency Models Soon
  • 07 CAP Theorem (Practical) Soon
  • 08 Stateless vs Stateful Systems Soon
  • 09 Caching Fundamentals Soon
  • 10 Load Balancing Basics Soon
  • 11 Synchronous vs Asynchronous Systems Soon
  • 12 Monolith vs Microservices Soon
  • 13 Tight vs Loose Coupling Soon
  • 14 How Systems Fail Soon
02

Traffic & Networking

How data moves across networks and how to design for it.

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  • 01 DNS Resolution Soon
  • 02 CDN & Edge Caching Soon
  • 03 Load Balancing & Traffic Distribution Soon
  • 04 API Gateway Patterns Soon
  • 05 VPC Architecture & Internal Traffic Flow Soon
  • 06 Outbound Traffic & NAT Patterns Soon
  • 07 Network Observability (VPC Flow Logs, Metrics) 10 min
  • 08 Anycast vs Unicast Routing Soon
  • 09 DNS Failover & Health Checks Soon
  • 10 Reverse Proxies & Edge Routing Patterns Soon
  • 11 TCP & Connection Management (Practical View) Soon
  • 12 TLS / HTTPS & Encryption Overhead Soon
  • 13 Rate Limiting & Traffic Shaping Soon
  • 14 Handling Traffic Spikes & Burst Patterns Soon
  • 15 API Gateway vs Load Balancer (When to Use What) Soon
  • 16 Network Security Layers (WAF, Security Groups, NACLs) Soon
  • 17 Egress Control & Private Endpoints Soon
  • 18 Multi-Region Traffic Routing (Geo, Failover, Latency-Based) Soon
  • 19 Service-to-Service Networking (East-West Traffic) Soon
  • 20 Service Mesh (Conceptual Overview) Soon
03

Data & Storage Architecture

Choosing and designing the right data layer for your system.

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  • 01 Data Modeling Fundamentals Soon
  • 02 SQL vs NoSQL Tradeoffs Soon
  • 03 Query Patterns & Access Design Soon
  • 04 Replication Models Soon
  • 05 Sharding Strategies Soon
  • 06 Caching Layers Soon
  • 07 Data Consistency & Integrity Soon
  • 08 Data Lakes vs Warehouses Soon
  • 09 Indexing Strategies (B-Tree, LSM — Conceptual) Soon
  • 10 Storage Engines (Conceptual Overview) Soon
  • 11 Data Fragmentation & Storage Efficiency 8 min
  • 12 Schema Design & Migrations Soon
  • 13 Backups & Disaster Recovery Soon
  • 14 Storage Tiering (Hot vs Cold Data) Soon
  • 15 Data Pipelines (Batch vs Streaming) Soon
04

Scalability & Performance Patterns

Patterns for systems that need to handle growth gracefully.

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  • 01 Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling Soon
  • 02 Load Distribution & Work Partitioning Soon
  • 03 Queue-Based Systems 9 min
  • 04 Async vs Sync Processing Soon
  • 05 Rate Limiting Soon
  • 06 Backpressure Soon
  • 07 Concurrency & Parallel Processing Soon
  • 08 Performance vs Scalability Soon
  • 09 Bulkheading (Workload Isolation) Soon
  • 10 Workload Prioritization & QoS Soon
  • 11 Batching & Aggregation Soon
  • 12 Caching for Performance Soon
  • 13 Auto Scaling & Load-Based Scaling Soon
  • 14 Handling Traffic Spikes Soon
05

Reliability & Resilience

Building systems that fail gracefully and recover automatically.

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  • 01 Failure Modes in Distributed Systems Soon
  • 02 Timeouts & Failure Detection Soon
  • 03 Retries and Backoff Soon
  • 04 Circuit Breaker Soon
  • 05 Graceful Degradation Soon
  • 06 Multi-Region Failover Soon
  • 07 Observability Soon
  • 08 Chaos Engineering Soon
  • 09 Bulkheading (Isolation of Failures) Soon
  • 10 Idempotency & Safe Retries Soon
  • 11 Redundancy & Replication for Resilience Soon
  • 12 Disaster Recovery Strategies Soon
  • 13 SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets Soon
  • 14 Alerting & Incident Response Soon
06

Cost-Aware Architecture

Engineering decisions that respect budget as a hard constraint.

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  • 01 Cost vs Performance Tradeoffs Soon
  • 02 Cost Drivers in Cloud Architecture Soon
  • 03 Serverless Cost Patterns Soon
  • 04 Network Cost Patterns (NAT, Data Transfer) Soon
  • 05 Storage Tiering Soon
  • 06 FinOps Basics Soon
  • 07 NAT Cost Optimisation 12 min
  • 08 Data Transfer & Egress Costs Soon
  • 09 Idle Resources & Overprovisioning Soon
  • 10 Cost Monitoring & Alerting Soon
  • 11 Budgeting & Forecasting Soon
  • 12 Cost Allocation (Tagging, Chargeback) Soon