A curated collection of essential resources, case studies, tools, courses, and playbooks to help you master System Design — from designing your first API to architecting distributed systems that scale to millions of users.

GitHub Description: A curated collection of resources, case studies, tools, and roadmaps to help you go from system design beginner to confidently architecting large-scale distributed systems.

System design is the skill that separates a good engineer from a great one.

This is a curated directory of the best system design resources for every stage of your journey — from understanding client-server architecture to designing systems like YouTube, WhatsApp, and Uber at scale. Whether you're a student preparing for FAANG interviews, an engineer leveling up, or an architect designing production systems, you'll find books, courses, case studies, tools, and communities for every level.

• Students — Preparing for SDE interviews at product companies
• Backend Engineers — Leveling up from writing code to designing systems
• Senior Engineers — Preparing for Staff / Principal interviews
• Engineering Managers — Understanding trade-offs in architectural decisions
• Founders & CTOs — Making the right architectural bets early
• Anyone who wants to think in systems, not just code

• Roadmaps — Step-by-step paths from basics to advanced
• Foundational Concepts — Networking, protocols, and distributed systems basics
• Scalability — Horizontal/vertical scaling, load balancing, and caching
• Databases — SQL vs NoSQL, sharding, replication, and CAP theorem
• Caching — Strategies, invalidation, CDN, and Redis patterns
• Messaging & Queues — Kafka, RabbitMQ, and async communication
• API Design — REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSockets
• Storage & File Systems — Object storage, blob storage, and CDNs
• Microservices — Service decomposition, communication, and patterns
• Security at Scale — Auth, rate limiting, and DDoS protection
• Reliability & Availability — Fault tolerance, SLAs, and disaster recovery
• Monitoring & Observability — Metrics, logs, traces, and alerting
• Real-World Case Studies — How top companies built their systems
• Interview Prep — Frameworks, templates, and practice problems
• Books & Courses — The best learning resources
• Tools — Diagramming, load testing, and architecture tools

• Roadmaps
• Foundational Concepts
• Scalability
• Load Balancing
• Caching
• Databases
• Replication & Sharding
• CAP Theorem & Consistency
• API Design
• Messaging & Event Streaming
• Microservices Architecture
• Storage & CDN
• Search Systems
• Rate Limiting & Throttling
• Authentication & Authorization at Scale
• Reliability & Fault Tolerance
• Monitoring & Observability
• Distributed Systems Concepts
• Real-World Case Studies
• System Design Interview Prep
• Books
• Courses & Videos
• Cheat Sheets & Quick References
• Diagramming & Architecture Tools
• GitHub Repositories
• Engineering Blogs
• Newsletters & Podcasts
• Communities & Forums
• Key Articles & Essays
• Practice Problems

• Roadmap.sh - System Design
• Roadmap.sh - Software Architect
• Roadmap.sh - Backend
• Tech Interview Handbook - System Design
• System Design Roadmap - GitHub
• High Scalability Learning Path
• ByteByteGo System Design Roadmap
• Distributed Systems Learning Path - MIT

• Computer Networking - Khan Academy
• HTTP & HTTPS Explained
• HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3
• TCP vs UDP
• DNS Resolution Explained
• WebSockets Explained
• Long Polling vs WebSockets vs SSE
• IP Addresses, Ports & Firewalls
• OSI Model Explained
• gRPC vs REST vs GraphQL

• Client-Server Model
• Monolith vs Microservices
• Three-Tier Architecture
• Peer-to-Peer Architecture
• Serverless Architecture

• Forward Proxy vs Reverse Proxy
• Nginx as Reverse Proxy
• HAProxy
• Envoy Proxy
• Service Mesh - Istio

• Scalability for Dummies
• Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
• Stateless vs Stateful Services
• The 12-Factor App
• Scale Cube - AKF Partners
• Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations
• Numbers Every Engineer Should Know
• Latency Numbers - Jeff Dean

• Web Performance Fundamentals - MDN
• TTFB, FCP, LCP Explained
• Connection Pooling
• Keep-Alive Connections

• Load Balancing Explained - Nginx
• Round Robin vs Least Connections vs IP Hash
• L4 vs L7 Load Balancing
• Consistent Hashing
• Consistent Hashing - Tom White
• Power of Two Choices
• Session Persistence / Sticky Sessions

• Nginx
• HAProxy
• AWS Elastic Load Balancer
• GCP Cloud Load Balancing
• Traefik
• Envoy

• Caching Strategies - AWS
• Cache-Aside (Lazy Loading)
• Write-Through vs Write-Behind vs Write-Around
• Cache Eviction Policies - LRU, LFU, FIFO
• Cache Stampede / Thundering Herd
• Cache Invalidation Strategies
• Negative Caching
• Distributed Caching

• Redis (Most popular)
• Redis Data Structures
• Redis Cluster
• Memcached
• Hazelcast
• Apache Ignite
• Varnish Cache

• What is a CDN? - Cloudflare
• CDN Caching Strategies
• Cloudflare
• AWS CloudFront
• Fastly
• Akamai
• CDN vs Load Balancer

• SQL vs NoSQL - MongoDB
• When to Use NoSQL
• Choosing a Database - AWS
• Polyglot Persistence

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• ACID Properties
• Database Indexes
• B-Tree vs Hash Indexes
• Query Optimization
• Database Normalization
• Transactions & Isolation Levels

• MongoDB
• Cassandra
• DynamoDB - AWS
• Redis
• Neo4j (Graph)
• InfluxDB (Time series)
• Elasticsearch
• HBase
• CouchDB

• Google Spanner
• CockroachDB
• TiDB
• YugabyteDB
• VoltDB

• Snowflake
• BigQuery - Google
• Redshift - AWS
• ClickHouse
• Databricks

• Database Replication Explained
• Master-Slave vs Master-Master Replication
• Read Replicas
• Synchronous vs Asynchronous Replication
• MySQL Replication Guide
• PostgreSQL Streaming Replication

• Database Sharding - MongoDB
• Sharding Strategies - Horizontal Partitioning
• Range vs Hash vs Directory Sharding
• Resharding & Hotspot Problem
• Consistent Hashing for Sharding
• Vitess - MySQL Sharding

• Horizontal vs Vertical Partitioning
• Partitioning in PostgreSQL
• Time-based Partitioning

• CAP Theorem Explained
• CAP Theorem - Martin Kleppmann
• PACELC Theorem
• Eventual Consistency
• Strong vs Eventual vs Causal Consistency
• Jepsen Analysis - Distributed Systems Safety

• Raft Consensus Algorithm
• Paxos Simplified
• Two-Phase Commit (2PC)
• Saga Pattern for Distributed Transactions
• Vector Clocks
• Gossip Protocol

• REST API Design Best Practices
• RESTful API Design - Microsoft
• HTTP Methods & Status Codes
• API Versioning Strategies
• HATEOAS
• Pagination in REST APIs
• OpenAPI / Swagger Specification

• GraphQL Official Docs
• REST vs GraphQL
• N+1 Problem in GraphQL
• GraphQL Persisted Queries
• DataLoader for Batching

• gRPC Official
• Protocol Buffers
• gRPC vs REST - Performance
• gRPC Streaming
• gRPC-Gateway

• WebSockets Explained
• Server-Sent Events (SSE)
• Long Polling
• Socket.IO
• Pusher
• Ably

• API Gateway Pattern
• AWS API Gateway
• Kong API Gateway
• Apigee - Google
• Tyk

• Message Queue vs Event Streaming
• RabbitMQ
• AWS SQS
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub
• Azure Service Bus
• ActiveMQ
• NATS

• Apache Kafka
• Kafka Architecture
• Kafka Topics, Partitions, Offsets
• Kafka vs RabbitMQ
• Apache Pulsar
• Amazon Kinesis
• Confluent Cloud

• Publisher-Subscriber Pattern
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Outbox Pattern
• Dead Letter Queue
• At-Least-Once vs At-Most-Once vs Exactly-Once Delivery
• Idempotency in Message Processing

• Microservices - Martin Fowler
• Microservices Patterns - Chris Richardson
• Monolith to Microservices - Sam Newman
• Domain-Driven Design Basics
• Bounded Context
• Service Decomposition Strategies

• Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication
• Service Discovery - Client vs Server Side
• API Gateway Pattern
• Backend for Frontend (BFF) Pattern
• Sidecar Pattern
• Strangler Fig Pattern

• Circuit Breaker Pattern
• Bulkhead Pattern
• Retry Pattern with Exponential Backoff
• Timeout Pattern
• Fallback Pattern
• Resilience4j

• Saga Pattern
• CQRS Pattern
• Event Sourcing
• Database per Service
• Shared Database Anti-Pattern

• AWS S3
• Google Cloud Storage
• Azure Blob Storage
• MinIO (Open source S3-compatible)
• Cloudflare R2

• Designing a Blob Storage System - ByteByteGo
• Pre-signed URLs for Secure File Uploads
• Chunked File Uploads
• Deduplication Strategies

• HDFS - Hadoop
• GFS - Google File System Paper
• Ceph
• GlusterFS

• Elasticsearch Architecture
• Inverted Index Explained
• Apache Solr
• Meilisearch
• Typesense
• Algolia
• Full Text Search vs Vector Search
• TF-IDF & BM25 Ranking
• Designing a Search System - ByteByteGo
• Typeahead / Autocomplete Design

• Token Bucket Algorithm
• Leaky Bucket Algorithm
• Fixed Window Counter
• Sliding Window Log
• Sliding Window Counter
• Designing a Rate Limiter - ByteByteGo

• Redis Rate Limiting
• Nginx Rate Limiting
• AWS API Gateway Throttling
• Bucket4j - Java Rate Limiting
• Resilience4j Rate Limiter

• JWT - JSON Web Tokens
• JWT vs Session Tokens
• OAuth 2.0 Explained
• OpenID Connect
• SAML vs OAuth vs OIDC
• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
• Passwordless Authentication

• RBAC vs ABAC
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
• Zanzibar - Google's Global Auth System
• OPA - Open Policy Agent

• Keycloak
• Auth0
• Okta
• AWS Cognito
• Firebase Auth
• Supabase Auth

• SLI, SLO, SLA Explained
• Availability Numbers (9s)
• MTTR, MTBF, MTTF
• Fault Tolerance vs High Availability
• Chaos Engineering
• Disaster Recovery Planning

• Circuit Breaker
• Bulkhead
• Retry with Backoff
• Health Check Pattern
• Blue-Green Deployment
• Canary Deployment
• Feature Flags

• Chaos Monkey - Netflix
• Gremlin
• AWS Fault Injection Simulator
• Litmus - Kubernetes Chaos

• Metrics, Logs, Traces - Overview
• OpenTelemetry
• Observability vs Monitoring

• Prometheus
• Grafana
• Datadog
• New Relic
• AWS CloudWatch

• ELK Stack - Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana
• Loki + Grafana
• Fluentd
• Splunk
• Structured Logging Best Practices

• Jaeger
• Zipkin
• AWS X-Ray
• Honeycomb
• Trace Context - W3C

• PagerDuty
• OpsGenie
• Alertmanager - Prometheus
• On-call Best Practices - Google SRE

• Fallacies of Distributed Computing
• The Google File System Paper
• Bigtable Paper
• Dynamo Paper - Amazon
• MapReduce Paper
• Spanner Paper - Google
• Raft Paper

• Distributed Transactions
• Idempotency
• Distributed Locking
• Leader Election
• Split Brain Problem
• Backpressure
• Clock Synchronization

• MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Book
• Distributed Systems - Cambridge (Free Notes)
• Martin Kleppmann's Distributed Systems Course

• How WhatsApp Works - Architecture
• Twitter Timeline Architecture
• Facebook's TAO - Social Graph
• Instagram Architecture
• Discord - Storing Billions of Messages
• Slack Architecture
• LinkedIn Architecture

• Netflix Architecture
• Netflix CDN - Open Connect
• YouTube Architecture
• Spotify Architecture
• Twitch Architecture

• Uber Architecture
• Uber's Geospatial Index - H3
• Lyft Architecture
• Google Maps Architecture
• Ola's Architecture at Scale

• Amazon's Dynamo
• Flipkart Engineering Blog
• Stripe's Architecture
• PayPal Scalability
• Shopify Scaling

• Google Search Architecture
• Elasticsearch at Scale
• Airbnb Architecture
• DoorDash Engineering
• Pinterest Architecture

• RESHADED Framework
• How to Approach System Design - ByteByteGo
• System Design Template
• 4-Step System Design Process
• Common Mistakes in System Design Interviews

• Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation Guide
• Latency Numbers - Jeff Dean
• Storage Estimation
• QPS Estimation
• Powers of Two Table

• Design a URL Shortener (TinyURL / Bit.ly)
• Design Twitter / X Feed
• Design WhatsApp / Messenger
• Design YouTube / Netflix
• Design Uber / Ola (Ride Sharing)
• Design Google Drive / Dropbox
• Design Instagram
• Design a Search Autocomplete System
• Design a Web Crawler
• Design a Notification System
• Design a Rate Limiter
• Design a Distributed Cache
• Design an API Gateway
• Design a Payment System
• Design a Ticketing System (BookMyShow)
• Design a Job Scheduler
• Design a Live Streaming System
• Design a Distributed Message Queue
• Design Google Maps
• Design a Leaderboard System

• Grokking System Design - Educative
• ByteByteGo
• System Design Interview - Alex Xu (Book)
• Pramp Mock Interviews
• Exponent System Design Practice
• interviewing.io
• System Design Questions - Glassdoor
• LeetCode System Design Tag

• System Design Interview Vol.1 - Alex Xu (Best for interviews)
• System Design Interview Vol.2 - Alex Xu & Sahn Lam
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann (Best overall)
• Building Microservices - Sam Newman
• Microservices Patterns - Chris Richardson

• Distributed Systems - Tanenbaum & Van Steen (Free)
• Understanding Distributed Systems - Roberto Vitillo
• Designing Distributed Systems - Brendan Burns
• Database Internals - Alex Petrov
• Foundations of Scalable Systems - Ian Gorton

• Clean Architecture - Robert C. Martin
• Software Architecture Patterns - Mark Richards (Free)
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler
• Release It! - Michael Nygard
• The Art of Scalability - Abbott & Fisher

• Site Reliability Engineering - Google (Free)
• The SRE Workbook - Google (Free)
• Database Reliability Engineering - Haines & Campbell

• MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Free)
• System Design by Gaurav Sen (YouTube)
• ByteByteGo YouTube Channel
• System Design by Arpit Bhayani (YouTube)
• Concept && Coding - Shrayansh (YouTube)
• TechDummies - Narendra (YouTube)
• CodeKarle (YouTube)
• System Design by Amazon (YouTube)
• KOSS System Design (YouTube)

• Grokking Modern System Design - Educative
• ByteByteGo System Design Course
• System Design Interview Course - Exponent
• Rocking System Design - Udemy
• Distributed Systems & Cloud Computing - Udemy

• Gaurav Sen
• ByteByteGo
• Arpit Bhayani
• TechDummies Narendra
• Concept && Coding
• CodeKarle
• Martin Kleppmann
• InfoQ
• Hussein Nasser

• System Design Cheat Sheet - GitHub
• Latency Numbers Every Engineer Should Know
• Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation Cheat Sheet
• CAP Theorem Cheat Sheet
• SQL vs NoSQL Decision Chart
• Load Balancing Algorithm Summary
• Caching Strategies Summary
• Availability Numbers (Nines)
• Microservices Patterns Map
• API Design Best Practices - Microsoft
• Data Consistency Levels
• Message Delivery Guarantees

• Excalidraw (Best for whiteboard-style)
• draw.io / diagrams.net
• Lucidchart
• Miro
• Whimsical
• PlantUML
• Mermaid.js
• Structurizr (C4 model)
• C4 Model

• Apache JMeter
• Gatling
• k6
• Locust
• Artillery
• wrk

• Postman
• Insomnia
• Wireshark
• curl
• HTTPie

• System Design Primer - donnemartin (270k+ stars)
• Awesome System Design
• System Design Resources - InterviewReady
• Awesome Scalability
• Distributed Systems Reading List
• ByteByteGo Newsletter Code
• System Design 101 - ByteByteGo
• Microservices Patterns - Chris Richardson
• Real World System Design
• Grokking System Design - Solutions

• Netflix Tech Blog
• Uber Engineering
• Airbnb Engineering
• Meta Engineering
• Google Research Blog
• AWS Architecture Blog
• LinkedIn Engineering
• Stripe Engineering
• Cloudflare Blog
• Discord Engineering
• Shopify Engineering
• Dropbox Tech Blog
• DoorDash Engineering
• Pinterest Engineering
• Twitter Engineering
• Slack Engineering
• GitHub Engineering
• High Scalability (Aggregates case studies)

• ByteByteGo Newsletter
• System Design Newsletter - Neo Kim
• Quastor - System Design
• Software Design - Arpit Bhayani
• The Pragmatic Engineer - Gergely Orosz
• Architecture Notes
• Level Up Software Engineering
• Pointer.io

• Software Engineering Daily
• The Changelog
• Distributed - InfoQ Podcast
• SE Radio
• Scaling DevTools
• Kubernetes Podcast

• r/ExperiencedDevs
• r/softwarearchitecture
• r/cscareerquestions
• r/SystemDesign
• Blind - Tech
• LeetCode Discuss - System Design
• High Scalability Community
• InfoQ Community
• Dev.to - System Design
• Hacker News

• The Log - Jay Kreps (LinkedIn)
• You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance - CAP
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing
• A Plain English Introduction to CAP Theorem
• Microservices - Martin Fowler
• CQRS - Martin Fowler
• Event Sourcing - Martin Fowler

• The Twelve-Factor App
• C4 Model for Software Architecture
• Evolutionary Architecture - Martin Fowler
• Cell-Based Architecture - AWS
• Zero Downtime Deployments
• The Senior Engineer's Guide to Design Decisions

• Design a URL Shortener
• Design a Pastebin
• Design a Key-Value Store
• Design a Rate Limiter
• Design a Cache System

• Design a Chat Application (WhatsApp)
• Design a Social Media Feed (Twitter)
• Design a Photo Sharing App (Instagram)
• Design a File Storage System (Dropbox)
• Design a Video Streaming Service (YouTube)
• Design a Notification System
• Design a Search Autocomplete

• Design Uber / Ola
• Design a Distributed Message Queue (Kafka)
• Design a Distributed Cache (Redis)
• Design a Web Crawler
• Design Google Maps
• Design a Payment System
• Design a Live Video Streaming System (Twitch)
• Design an Ad Click Aggregation System
• Design a Hotel Booking System (MakeMyTrip)
• Design a Flight Booking System
• Design a Stock Exchange System
• Design a Distributed Job Scheduler

We welcome contributions from the community! Here's how you can help:

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• Ensure the resource is relevant to Python development
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• Add a brief description if needed
• Place it in the appropriate category
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This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

This repository is maintained by Avinash Singh Special thanks to all contributors who have helped curate and maintain this collection.

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