10-part series

System Design course for beginners — scale systems from 1 to 1M users

Free system design course: 10 lessons from monolith, Redis, CDN, replicas, load balancers, queues, and sharding to interview prep and a URL shortener capstone—with architecture diagrams.

This **beginner system design** course is for developers and interview prep—no prior distributed-systems background required. You scale **from one user toward ~1M MAU** using a **URL shortener (ShortLink)** case study: monolith, PostgreSQL, **Redis**, **CDN**, **read replicas**, **load balancers**, **message queues**, **sharding**, and **multi-region** patterns.

Start with part 1 — metrics and estimation. See also: Learn system design from scratch.

Start with part 1 →

System design FAQs

What is system design for beginners?

System design is how you pick components—databases, caches, load balancers, queues—so the product meets traffic, latency, and reliability goals. This 10-part course scales a ShortLink app from one user toward ~1M users; start at part 1.

Does this course help with system design interviews?

Yes at junior–mid level: metrics, QPS estimates, cache-aside, replicas, load balancing, queues, sharding, and a capstone mock. Part 9 is a cheat sheet; part 10 includes a rubric.

How do you scale from 1 to 1 million users?

Follow the series: managed DB → Redis + CDN → read replicas → horizontal app + LB → queues and service split → sharding and multi-region—adding complexity only when SLOs require it.

How is this different from general software design?

Interview-style system design focuses on distributed trade-offs: throughput, consistency, failure modes, and infrastructure cost at scale—not just coding patterns or SDLC process.

All parts in this series

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