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Further resources

This course covers the fundamentals; these go deeper on specific topics, and give you more systems to practice designing.

Practice prompts

The best way to retain this material is to design a new system from scratch using the same framework: requirements, scale estimate, architecture, data model, then caching, reliability, security, and observability. Try these, in roughly increasing order of difficulty:

Pastebin

Very close to Shorty — a good first system to design fully on your own before looking at hints.

A social media feed

Introduces fan-out at write time vs read time, and ranking.

A ride-sharing dispatch service

Adds geospatial queries and matching under tight latency.

A payments system

Forces strong consistency, idempotency, and auditability trade-offs that Shorty could avoid.

A video streaming service

Introduces large binary storage, transcoding pipelines, and CDN-heavy delivery.

A collaborative document editor

Introduces operational transforms / CRDTs and real-time multi-writer consistency.

Books

Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann — the deepest, most rigorous treatment of the data-layer topics in this course: replication, sharding, and consistency.
System Design Interview (Volumes 1 & 2) by Alex Xu — worked, interview-style walkthroughs of many of the practice prompts above.
Site Reliability Engineering and The Site Reliability Workbook, both from Google — the deeper version of this course's reliability and observability lessons, freely readable online.
Web Scalability for Startup Engineers by Artur Ejsmont — a practical, less academic take on scaling the components covered here.

Sites worth bookmarking

MDN Web Docs — the reference for HTTP, networking, and web platform behavior touched on in the networking lesson.
The Amazon Builders' Library — real engineering write-ups on caching, load balancing, and reliability patterns from a large-scale operator.
Google SRE books — the full text of the SRE books, free to read, for the reliability and observability lessons.
High Scalability — a long-running blog of real-world architecture write-ups, good for seeing how the concepts in this course show up in production systems.

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