Learn the basic anatomy of a production application from the perspective of a developer and an end-user

0 – Computer Architecture

Learn the major components of a computer and how they work together. Individual computers are the building blocks of large scale systems and understanding how they work is crucial for design effective systems.

 

1 – Application Architecture

Learn the basic anatomy of a production application from the perspective of a developer and an end-user. The vast majority of applications follow this high-level architecture.

 

2 – Design Requirements

Learn what it means to design an effective distributed system. And how they are measured, including availability, reliability and scalability.

 

3 – Networking Basics

Learn how computers can send data to eachother.

 

 

4 – TCP and UDP

Learn the high-level differences between the TCP and UDP transport layer protocols.

 

5 – DNS

Learn the basics of the Domain Name System which translates domains into IP addresses.

 

6 – HTTP

Learn about the protocol of the internet: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

 

7 – WebSockets

Learn how the WebSockets protocol can fill in the gaps left by HTTP/1.1.

 

8 – API Paradigms

Learn about 3 modern API patterns: REST, GraphQL and gRPC.

 

9 – API Design

Learn about the basics of API design, focusing on designing a REST API for Twitter.

 

10 – Caching

Learn about the basics of caching, from CPU caches to browser and in-memory caches.

 

11 – CDNs

Learn about content delivery networks and how they can reduce network latency for users around the world.

 

12 – Proxies and Load Balancing

Learn about the basics of proxies, including the difference between forward-proxies and reverse-proxies. And understand the basics of load balancers, which are an instance of reverse-proxies.

 

13 – Consistent Hashing

Learn the benefits of using consistent hashing to distribute traffic.

 

14 – SQL

Learn the basics of relational database management systems, including B+ Tree structures and ACID properties.

 

15 – NoSQL

Learn about popular NoSQL databases like Key-Value stores, document-based and graph-based databases.

 

16 – Replication and Sharding

Learn how replication and sharding can allow databases to overcome some limitations, but not without their own tradeoffs.

 

17 – CAP Theorem

Learn about CAP and PACECL theorems and how we can use them to understand tradeoffs within distributed data storage.

 

18 – Object Storage

Learn the use cases for BLOB (Binary Large Object) and Object storage.

 

19 – Messaging Queues

Learn how message queues and the Pub/Sub pattern can help scale and decouple our designs.

 

20 – MapReduce

Learn the basics of the MapReduce model for processing large datasets in parallel.