Advanced Distributed Systems
How the systems under your system really work: consensus, storage engines, Kafka and Redis internals, load balancing, resilience patterns, Kubernetes and cloud design.
10 lessons2 h 10 minAdvanced
What you'll learn
0 of 10 lessons complete
Who this is for and what you will be able to do
Who this is for
Engineers who know the basics of scaling and databases and want to understand what happens inside the infrastructure they depend on.
After this course you will be able to
- Explain how consensus protocols such as Raft keep replicas agreeing
- Compare B-tree and LSM-tree storage engines and explain the write-ahead log
- Describe how Kafka and Redis store, replicate and recover data
- Choose between layer 4 and layer 7 load balancing and design gateway behaviour
- Apply bulkheads, backpressure, timeouts, retries and circuit breakers together
- Read a Kubernetes setup and a cloud architecture against well-known design principles
Topics it coversDistributed SystemsAPI GatewayConsensusDockerKafkaKubernetesLoad BalancerRedisAll topics
How a lesson works
Interactive diagram
See how each component connects, then run a request through it.
Plain-words toggle
Switch between the technical explanation and a plain-language one.
Practice design
Change a design of your own in the builder and see how it holds up.
Quiz and exercise
Test your understanding before moving on.
Go deeper
These lessons are written from scratch. The books below are excellent next reads.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applicationsby Martin Kleppmannthe standard book on these topics
- In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft)by Ongaro and Ousterhoutthe Raft paper; short and readable
- Site Reliability Engineeringby Googlefree online; reliability practice