System Design Patterns
The recurring distributed systems patterns behind most designs, including write ahead logs, leases, heartbeats, quorums, segmented logs and consistent hashing. Learn the patterns once and you stop reinventing an answer for every question.
Course
System Design
Design Gurus
3 weeks
Intermediate
Subscription
What it is
A catalogue of the patterns that keep reappearing across distributed systems, each explained on its own with the problem it solves and where it is used in practice.
Why patterns beat memorised designs
Every large system is an arrangement of a modest number of ideas. Write ahead log, segmented log, high water mark, leader and follower, quorum, generation clock, lease, heartbeat, consistent hashing, bloom filter. Once you can name and apply these, an unfamiliar design question becomes an exercise in selection rather than invention.
How to use it
After each pattern, find a real system that uses it and read a paragraph about how. Attaching a pattern to a concrete system is what makes it retrievable a month later under interview pressure.
Best for: engineers who can follow a design walkthrough and want to be able to produce one unaided.
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Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Every session is free; a few slots open each week.
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