Advanced System Design Interview, Volume II

What the course covers

The course page lists 22 chapters, 224 lessons and 420 assessments, with about 36 hours of study time. It has three parts.

Advanced case studies, each worked through the same way (definition, requirements, capacity estimation, API, high-level design, data model, detailed components, scalability and failure modes):

• YouTube likes counter, unique ID generator, notification service
• Reddit, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google News
• A recommendation system and a code judging system
• A payment system, a flash sale system and a reminder alert system

System design patterns: a 22-lesson chapter on the distributed systems patterns senior interviews assume you know, such as consistent hashing, quorum, write-ahead log, leader and follower, Merkle trees, vector clocks, read repair, hinted handoff and gossip.

Deep dives into real systems: Dynamo (key-value store), Cassandra (wide-column database), Kafka (distributed messaging), Chubby (distributed locking), HDFS and GFS (distributed file storage) and BigTable (wide-column storage). Each takes the system apart: how it partitions data, survives node failures and keeps its consistency guarantees.

The course ends with a final assessment.

Ratings and learners

As of September 2026 the course page shows a rating of 4.8 out of 5 from 10,418 ratings and 31,255 learners, and it was updated within the last month.

Where it fits in your preparation

The first volume, Grokking the System Design Interview, teaches you to assemble known components into a working design. This volume goes underneath those components. At mid level, naming a component is often enough. At senior and staff level, interviewers pick your choice apart: why this replication strategy, what happens during a network partition, how the system behaves when the leader dies. Answering those questions needs an understanding of the machinery, which is what the deep dives provide.

How to get the most from it

• Take the first volume first, or be confident you can already structure a design end to end.
• Alternate case studies and deep dives. After the payment system, read the Kafka and Dynamo chapters and look for where their ideas appear in the design.
• Attempt each case study before reading it. Spend 30 to 45 minutes on the requirements, estimates and high-level design, then compare.
• Practise defending one decision per design out loud, for example your choice of consistency level, and answer the follow-up "what if the leader fails?".
• Plan on six to ten weeks at an hour a day for 36 hours of material with practice.

What you will be able to do afterwards

Explain how real distributed systems handle partitioning, replication and failure; reason about consistency trade-offs using CAP, PACELC and quorum; and lead a senior-level design discussion, including the deep dive and failure scenarios, rather than stopping at the diagram.

Buying and access

The course is paid: you can buy it once for lifetime access, or get it as part of an all-access subscription covering more than 40 courses. Prices shown depend on your region and current offers, so check the course page. A free preview lets you read the opening lessons first, and a certificate is issued on completion.

Common questions

Do I need Volume I first? It is strongly recommended. This course assumes the framework and fundamentals from the first volume.

Is it only for senior engineers? It is aimed at L5 and L6 rounds, but mid-level engineers who want deeper understanding of distributed systems also benefit.

Are there videos? The course is mainly text and diagrams, with a couple of videos and many quizzes.

Best for: engineers preparing for senior or staff system design rounds who need to defend designs under failure.