Complete Guide

Complete System Design Tutorial

System design interviews separate senior engineers from the rest. This guide covers all 145 system design topics on TheCodeForge — from load balancing and caching to microservices and real-world architecture.

Learning Roadmap

Beginner → Understand client-server, APIs, databases and caching basics

Intermediate → Design scalable services with load balancing and message queues

Advanced → Architect distributed systems, handle failures and interview confidently

145

Topics

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Jump to section

Fundamentals (10)Components (23)Architecture (17)Real World (40)Databases in Design (5)Security (13)Estimation (5)Networking (7)Database Internals (9)Distributed Systems (9)Async & Data Processing (7)

Fundamentals

System Design Basics Intermediate Scalability Concepts Intermediate CAP Theorem Advanced Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling Intermediate Monolith vs Microservices Intermediate SQL vs NoSQL in System Design Intermediate Latency and Throughput Intermediate Availability and Reliability Intermediate SLA and Uptime Calculation Intermediate Idempotency in API Design Intermediate

Components

Load Balancing Intermediate What Is a Load Balancer? Types, Algorithms and How They Work Beginner Caching Strategies Intermediate CDN — Content Delivery Network Intermediate Message Queues Intermediate API Gateway Intermediate Rate Limiting Intermediate Service Discovery Advanced Circuit Breaker Pattern Advanced Reverse Proxy vs Forward Proxy Intermediate Consistent Hashing Advanced Bloom Filter Advanced Sidecar Pattern in Microservices Advanced WebRTC Explained Advanced Gossip Protocol Advanced HTTP 500 Internal Server Error: Causes, Debugging and Fixes Beginner What is a Browser Cache? How It Works and When It Breaks Things Beginner gRPC vs REST: When to Use Each in Modern APIs Intermediate Cache Eviction Policies Intermediate Distributed Caching Intermediate Multi-Level Caching Intermediate Geohashing and Quadtrees Advanced Location-Based Services Advanced

Architecture

Microservices Architecture Advanced REST API Design Intermediate GraphQL vs REST Intermediate Event-Driven Architecture Advanced CQRS Pattern Advanced Event Sourcing Advanced Saga Pattern Advanced Strangler Fig Pattern Advanced Hexagonal Architecture Advanced Domain-Driven Design Basics Advanced Twelve Factor App Intermediate Backend for Frontend Pattern Advanced Software Architecture Explained: Patterns, Trade-offs and Real Decisions Intermediate Serverless Architecture Intermediate Service Mesh Advanced Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Architecture Intermediate Clean Architecture Intermediate

Real World

Design URL Shortener Advanced Design Twitter Feed Advanced Design YouTube Advanced Design WhatsApp Advanced Design Uber Advanced Design Google Search Advanced Design Amazon Advanced Design Netflix Advanced Design Dropbox Advanced Design Slack Advanced Design a Rate Limiter Advanced Design a Notification System Advanced Design a Search Autocomplete Advanced Design a Payment System Advanced Design a Live Video Streaming System Advanced Design an E-commerce Platform Advanced Design a Content Moderation System Advanced Design a Web Crawler Advanced Design Google Docs Advanced Design Instagram Intermediate Design a Distributed Message Queue Advanced Design a Distributed Key-Value Store Advanced Design Object Storage (S3) Advanced Design a Proximity Service Advanced Design Ticketmaster Advanced Design a Distributed Job Scheduler Advanced Design Pastebin Intermediate Design TikTok Intermediate Design Reddit Intermediate Design Tinder Intermediate Design Spotify Intermediate Design Zoom Advanced Design Google Maps Advanced Design Airbnb Intermediate Design a Digital Wallet Advanced Design a Stock Exchange Advanced Design a Code Deployment System Advanced Design a Distributed Cache Advanced Design a Distributed Locking Service Advanced Design a Flight Booking System Advanced

Databases in Design

Database Selection Guide Intermediate Choosing Between Redis and Memcached Advanced Data Warehousing Basics Advanced Data Lake vs Data Warehouse Advanced Time Series Databases Advanced

Security

OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect Advanced JWT Authentication Flow Intermediate HTTPS and TLS Explained Intermediate API Security Best Practices Advanced CSRF and XSS Prevention Intermediate Encryption at Rest and in Transit Intermediate What is Salting in Security? (Password Protection Explained) Beginner Biometric Authentication Explained: Types and How It Works Intermediate Nmap Tutorial: Network Scanning and Host Discovery Intermediate What is an API Key? How They Work, Where They Go Wrong Beginner SSO and SAML Intermediate Authorization: RBAC vs ABAC Intermediate mTLS Explained Intermediate

Estimation

Back of Envelope Estimation Intermediate Capacity Planning Basics Intermediate QPS — Queries Per Second Intermediate Storage Estimation Techniques Intermediate Bandwidth Estimation Techniques Intermediate

Networking

How DNS Works Beginner TCP vs UDP Beginner The OSI Model Beginner HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3 (QUIC) Intermediate WebSockets Explained Intermediate Long Polling vs SSE vs WebSockets Intermediate IP Addressing and Anycast Intermediate

Database Internals

Database Replication Intermediate Database Sharding Intermediate Database Indexing Intermediate Normalization vs Denormalization Beginner ACID vs BASE Intermediate Change Data Capture (CDC) Advanced Database Federation Intermediate NoSQL Store Types Compared Intermediate LSM Trees and SSTables Advanced

Distributed Systems

Distributed Consensus: Paxos and Raft Advanced Leader Election Intermediate Quorum: R + W > N Intermediate Distributed Transactions and 2PC Advanced Distributed Locking Intermediate Consistency Models Intermediate PACELC Theorem Intermediate Vector and Lamport Clocks Advanced Heartbeats and Failure Detection Intermediate

Async & Data Processing

Publish-Subscribe Pattern Intermediate Kafka and the Distributed Log Advanced MapReduce and Batch Processing Intermediate Stream Processing Intermediate Inverted Index and Text Search Intermediate Backpressure Intermediate Transactional Outbox Pattern Advanced

Also Explore

DSA 185 tutorials → DevOps 230 tutorials → Database 117 tutorials → Interview 76 tutorials →

Start from the beginning

Every tutorial starts with a plain-English analogy — then real code, then interview questions.

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