Frontend Labs
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Table of Contents

Part 0 — Getting Started

  1. What System Design Is, and How the Interview Works
  2. The Framework: A 45–60 Minute Design, Step by Step

Part I — Beginner: Foundations 3. Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation 4. Building Blocks & Scaling from 1 to 10 Million Users 5. APIs & Communication Protocols 6. Storage Fundamentals: Choosing a Database 7. Caching 8. Scaling Basics: Replication, Read Replicas, Statelessness

Part II — Intermediate: Distributed Systems Core 9. Partitioning & Sharding 10. Replication & Consistency Models 11. Asynchronous Processing: Queues, Logs, Streams 12. Distributed Transactions: 2PC, Sagas, Outbox 13. Service Boundaries: Monolith, Microservices, and Conway's Law 14. Reliability Patterns & Availability Math 15. Specialized Indexes: Search, Geo, Time-Series 16. Observability, SLIs/SLOs & Error Budgets 17. Security & Multi-Tenancy in Design 18. Data Modeling Practice

Part III — Advanced: Distributed Systems in Depth 19. Consensus, Coordination & Time 20. Multi-Region, Cells & Disaster Recovery 21. Data Platforms: OLTP, OLAP, CDC & Stream Processing 22. Performance at Extreme Scale: Queueing, Tails, Metastability 23. Verifying Distributed Systems 24. Backup & Restore as a Discipline 25. AI/ML & LLM Systems Design 26. Agentic AI Systems

Part IV — Expert: Strategy, Economics & Leadership 27. Business Outcomes → Architecture: The Translation Layer 28. Cost Engineering & Unit Economics 29. Evolution & Migrations Without Downtime 30. The Leadership Layer: Decisions, Org, Risk

Part V — Casebook: Real Interview Problems, Solved 31. URL Shortener (warm-up) 32. Distributed Rate Limiter 33. News Feed / Timeline 34. Chat & Messaging (WhatsApp / Teams) 35. Notification Platform 36. Ride-Hailing & Proximity Search (Uber) 37. Video Streaming (YouTube / Netflix) 38. Distributed Key-Value Store (Dynamo) 39. Payments & Ledger (Stripe) 40. Ticketing & Flash Sales (Ticketmaster) 41. Collaborative Editing (Google Docs / Office 365) 42. Search Autocomplete / Typeahead 43. Web Crawler 44. Ad Click Aggregation & Top-K 45. File Sync & Storage (Dropbox / OneDrive / Drive) 46. Distributed Job Scheduler

Part VI — Step-by-Step Interview Walkthroughs 47. How to Use These Walkthroughs 48. Walkthrough: Design Instagram 49. Walkthrough: Design a CDN 50. Walkthrough: Design Web Search (Google) 51. Walkthrough: Design Google Maps Routing & Navigation 52. Walkthrough: Design Object Storage (S3) 53. Walkthrough: Design a Metrics Monitoring & Alerting Platform 54. Walkthrough: Design a Global Configuration & Feature-Flag Platform 55. Walkthrough: Design a Secrets Manager & Key Management Service (KMS) 56. Walkthrough: Design a Certificate Authority / Cert-Minting Service 57. Walkthrough: Design a Service Mesh 58. Walkthrough: Design a Cluster Scheduler / Container Orchestrator (Kubernetes, Borg) 59. Walkthrough: Design a Stock Exchange Matching Engine

Part VII — Interview Playbook 60. Level Calibration: Senior, Staff, Principal, and Engineering Managers 61. Company-Specific Notes: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon & Others 62. Communication: Driving the Whiteboard 63. Drawing System Designs: Whiteboard, Paper, and Virtual Canvas 64. "Walk Me Through a System You Designed" — The Past-Project Deep Dive 65. Red Flags & Common Failure Modes 66. An 8-Week Study Plan 67. Interview Prompt Bank: Real-World Questions, Mapped 68. Cheat Sheets & Further Reading

Appendices

Generated from real-life-system-design-guide.md · 8 Oct 2026 16:36