Full-Stack EdgeAvailable

System Design for Web Engineers

About this course

System design interviews and real architecture decisions share the same skill: reasoning about trade-offs under constraints. This course covers databases, caching, message queues, load balancing, CDNs, rate limiting, and designing for failure.

What you will learn

  • A framework for approaching system design questions
  • Database selection: relational, document, graph, time-series
  • Caching strategies and invalidation patterns
  • Message queues and event streaming trade-offs
  • Load balancing: L4 vs L7, health checks, and draining
  • CDN and edge computing patterns
  • Rate limiting and backpressure mechanisms
  • Designing for failure: circuit breakers and chaos engineering

Your instructor

Ayodele Ajayi

Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer based in Kent, UK, with extensive experience across cloud-native security, platform engineering, and distributed systems. Ayodele has led engineering teams at scale and writes about what he learns — with a bias towards things that actually work in production.

Continue building your skills in this area.

TypeScript Design Patterns

8 lessons

AWS Solutions Architecture

8 lessons