About this course
Imagine you’re building the next viral app. One day it’s handling 100 users, the next it’s millions. Without a solid system design, your database buckles, pages load like dial-up, and users flee. This course gives you the foundational patterns to prevent that nightmare.
You’ll explore three concrete topics: how load balancers distribute traffic across servers, why caching (with tools like Redis) cuts response times from seconds to milliseconds, and the art of database sharding—splitting data across multiple machines so no single server becomes a bottleneck. Each concept is taught through real-world scenarios, like designing a URL shortener or a chat system.
This is for developers who have built apps solo but now need to think about scale. Maybe you’re preparing for a technical interview at a big tech company, or you’re a backend engineer who wants to move from “making it work” to “making it work for millions.” After this course, you’ll be able to sketch a high-level architecture, identify where a system will fail under load, and choose the right trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
