Master System Design Concepts with Microsoft Engineer

Learn to build scalable systems: networking, databases & distributed systems.
What you'll learn
Explain core system design fundamentals, including scaling strategies, performance metrics, reliability, and trade-offs used in modern backend systems.
Analyze how real-world systems scale from zero to millions of users by understanding client-server interactions, traffic growth, capacity limits, and bottleneck
Design scalable data architectures using SQL, NoSQL, key-value stores, indexing, consistent hashing, replication, and sharding.
Evaluate distributed system concepts like high availability, resiliency, latency percentiles, and message queues to build robust, fault-tolerant services.
Apply foundational networking, routing, and service architecture concepts such as DNS, API design, proxies, load balancing, microservices, and service discovery
Requirements
Basics of Software Engineering
Description
Learn System Design from Someone Who's Built Systems at ScaleAre you preparing for software engineering interviews at top tech companies? Want to understand how applications scale from a few users to millions? This course teaches you system design through the lens of real-world distributed systems.This isn't a collection of short, surface-level videos for entertainment. This is a comprehensive, structured learning experience designed to build genuine understanding. Each lesson is carefully crafted to help you truly master the concepts, not just memorize them for an interview.I'm a Software Engineer at Microsoft with over 5 years of experience working on the backend infrastructure of Microsoft Teams, a platform serving hundreds of millions of users daily. I've designed this course to teach you not just the theory, but the practical reasoning behind system design decisions.What You'll Learn:System Design FundamentalsHow to scale applications from 0 to a million usersPerformance trade-offs: latency vs throughput, vertical vs horizontal scalingBack-of-the-envelope calculations for system sizingMessage queues and event-driven architecturesNetworking & Traffic ManagementCore protocols: TCP, UDP, HTTP, and gRPCDNS and routing mechanismsAPI design patterns (REST, RPC, versioning)Load balancers, proxies, and API gatewaysService ArchitectureWhen to use microservices (and when not to)API GatewaysDatabases & Data ArchitectureSQL vs NoSQL: choosing the right databaseCAP theorem in practiceIndexing, replication, and sharding strategiesConsistent hashingDistributed Systems ConceptsDesigning for fault tolerance and high availabilityUnderstanding latency percentiles (p90, p95, p99)
Who this course is for
Backend Software Engineers
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