Course Overview
This course is the next step in our System Design Learning Path. If you have already taken "Grokking the System Design Interview" and strengthened your foundation with "Grokking System Design Fundamentals", it’s time to take your skills to the next level with Grokking Scalable Systems for Interviews — an advanced system design course focused on building and scaling real-world distributed systems. Every FAANG-level engineer knows this secret: designing systems that work is easy, designing systems that scale is what separates good engineers from great ones. Grokking Scalable Systems teaches you how to design large-scale architectures that stay fast, reliable, and fault-tolerant under real-world traffic. You’ll go far beyond interview theory - exploring how distributed systems, caching, replication, load balancing, observability, and security all come together in production. Through bite-sized lessons, diagrams, and hands-on examples, you’ll finally understand the trade-offs that power every major tech system, from Netflix’s streaming pipelines to Instagram’s feed.
What you'll learn
- Learn how to design scalable, fault-tolerant systems that can handle millions of users.
- Understand distributed system concepts like consistency, quorum, and message delivery semantics.
- Gain real-world insights into observability, deployments, and graceful degradation.
- Master caching, sharding, and replication to boost performance and reliability at scale.
- Build resilient APIs with idempotency, rate limiting, retries, and backoff strategies.
- Think like a senior engineer — make trade-offs between consistency, latency, and availability with confidence.
Course Content
1.
Introduction
2.
Caching
3.
Load Balancing
4.
API Basics
5.
Databases
6.
Scalability
7.
Sharding and Partitioning
8.
Messaging and Streaming
9.
Consistency and Replication
10.
Observability
11.
Security
12.
Networking
13.
Storage
14.
Design Patterns
15.
Reliability and Operations
16.
Time and IDs
17.
Conclusion
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FAQs
What is Grokking Scalable Systems
Grokking Scalable Systems is an advanced system design course that teaches you how to build and scale distributed systems like those used at Google, Netflix, and Amazon — covering caching, sharding, load balancing, replication, observability, and more.
Who should take this course
This course is designed for **software engineers, backend developers, and architects** preparing for **senior-level system design interviews** or building **large-scale production systems** in their day-to-day work.
How is this course different from Grokking the System Design Interview
While **Grokking the System Design Interview** focuses on interview problem-solving frameworks, **Grokking Scalable Systems** dives deeper into the **real-world engineering principles** behind scalable architectures — including **performance, reliability, and fault tolerance**.
Do I need to complete any other courses before this one?
It’s recommended to first take [**Grokking System Design Fundamentals**](https://www.designgurus.io/course/grokking-system-design-fundamentals) and [**Grokking the System Design Interview**](https://www.designgurus.io/course/grokking-the-system-design-interview), which build your foundation for the advanced topics covered in **Grokking Scalable Systems**.
What topics are covered in Grokking Scalable Systems?
You’ll learn **scalability principles**, **load balancing**, **API design**, **database internals**, **sharding and caching strategies**, **distributed messaging**, **consistency models**, **observability**, and **deployment reliability** — all explained with real-world scenarios.
Will this course help me in system design interviews at FAANG companies?
Absolutely. This course bridges the gap between **interview theory and production reality**, helping you confidently answer advanced system design questions and discuss **scalability trade-offs** in FAANG and top tech company interviews.
