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✅ Architect Level
System Design Fundamentals
Complete Beginner → Advanced Syllabus (Pin-to-Pin)
🟢 LEVEL 1 — Core Concepts
1. What is System Design
- Definition & scope
- System design vs software design
- Goals of system design
- Trade-off fundamentals
2. Essential Properties
- Scalability
- Availability
- Reliability
- Performance
🟢 LEVEL 2 — Scalability Types
3. Horizontal Scalability
- Adding more servers
- Distributed load
- Load balancing
- Stateless design
4. Vertical Scalability
- Single server upgrade
- Capacity limits
- Cost implications
- When to use vertical scaling
🟡 LEVEL 3 — Availability
5. High Availability
- Redundancy
- Failover mechanisms
- Uptime targets (9s)
- SLOs & SLAs
6. Zone Redundancy
- Multiple availability zones
- Active-passive setup
- Active-active setup
- Disaster recovery
🟡 LEVEL 4 — Reliability
7. Reliability vs Availability
- Difference and relationship
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)
- MTTR optimization
8. Resilience
- Fault tolerance
- Graceful degradation
- Circuit breakers
- Bulkheads
🟠 LEVEL 5 — Consistency Models
9. Strong Consistency
- Immediate data consistency
- ACID transactions
- Blocking operations
- Performance impact
10. Weak Consistency
- Data propagation delays
- Eventual consistency
- Causal consistency
- Read-after-write
🟠 LEVEL 6 — CAP Theorem
11. CAP Theorem Explained
- Consistency
- Availability
- Partition tolerance
- Three possibilities (CA, CP, AP)
12. System Trade-offs
- CP systems (databases)
- AP systems (distributed caches)
- Real-world implications
- Choosing based on requirements
🔵 LEVEL 7 — Eventual Consistency
13. Eventual Consistency Model
- Asynchronous propagation
- Convergence guarantee
- Conflict resolution
- Last-write-wins
14. Real-World Applications
- DNS systems
- Social media feeds
- Shopping carts
- Recommendation engines
🔵 LEVEL 8 — Advanced Concepts
15. Sharding & Partitioning
- Data partitioning strategies
- Shard key selection
- Resharding challenges
- Hot spots
16. Replication Strategies
- Master-slave replication
- Multi-master replication
- Lag & consistency
- Replication failure recovery
🔴 LEVEL 9 — Governance & Trade-offs
17. Design Trade-offs
- Consistency vs availability
- Speed vs cost
- Complexity vs capability
- Technical debt considerations
18. Architecture Decisions
- Documenting trade-offs
- ADRs (Architecture Decision Records)
- System monitoring & observability
- Continuous improvement
⭐ Senior Frontend Focus (Must Master)
- Frontend user experience with eventual consistency
- Handling stale data display
- Optimistic updates & rollback strategies
- Cache invalidation in client applications
- Loading states and skeleton screens
- Real-time sync with WebSockets
- Offline-first architecture patterns