Learning pathsystem-designdevopsapis
System Design Foundations Path
A practical tour through cache invalidation, queues, sharding, rate limiting, SLOs, and observability.
Path reward
System Slayer
Engineers preparing for system-design interviews or first platform ownership.
Demo progress: start the first mission to begin tracking.
Tradeoff lens
Recognize reliability, latency, and consistency costs. Required clears: 2.
Scale map
Connect storage, queues, caches, and limits. Required clears: 5.
Review-ready
Explain architecture under realistic constraints. Required clears: 8.
Mission chain
Step 1
Warm up with cache invalidation plan
Easy System Design arena: TTL choices, write-through versus cache-aside, and stale-read risk
Step 2
Warm up with queue backpressure design
Easy System Design arena: message queues, retries, dead-letter queues, and flow control
Step 3
Stabilize distributed rate limiter
Medium System Design arena: token buckets, sliding windows, clock drift, and tenant isolation
Step 4
Stabilize SLO alert tuning
Medium DevOps Basics arena: burn-rate alerts, error budgets, latency histograms, and actionable pages
Step 5
Harden database sharding strategy
Hard System Design arena: partition keys, hot shards, rebalancing, and query patterns
Step 6
Harden SLO observability map
Hard System Design arena: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, tracing, and alert quality
Step 7
Rescue rate limit error envelope
Extreme APIs arena: 429 responses, Retry-After, quotas, and client backoff
Step 8
Master database sharding strategy
Insane System Design arena: partition keys, hot shards, rebalancing, and query patterns