The System Design Primer

Motivation

Learn how to design large scale systems from the open source community.

Understand real-world architectures.

Prep for the system design interview.

Learn how to design large scale systems

Learning how to design scalable systems will make you a better engineer.

System design is a broad topic. There is a vast amount of resources scattered throughout the web on system design principles.

This repo is an organized collection of resources to help you learn how to build systems at scale.

Topics for learning system design:

• System design topic summaries
• Real world architectures
• Engineering blogs

Learn from the open source community

This is an early draft of a continually updated, open source project.

Contributions are welcome!

Prep for the system design interview

In addition to coding interviews, system design is a required component of the technical interview process at many tech companies.

Practice common system design interview questions and compare your results with sample discussions, code, and diagrams.

Additional topics for interview prep:

• Study guide
• How to approach a system design interview question
• System design interview questions, with solutions
• Object-oriented design interview questions, with solutions
• Additional system design interview questions

For interviews, do I need to know everything here?

No, you don't need to know everything here to prepare for the interview.

What you are asked in an interview depends on variables such as:

• How much experience you have
• What your technical background is
• What positions you are interviewing for
• Which companies you are interviewing with
• Luck

More experienced candidates are generally expected to know more about system design. Architects or team leads might be expected to know more than individual contributors. Top tech companies are likely to have one or more design interview rounds.

Any resources to prep for coding interviews?

Check out the sister repo interactive-coding-challenges for coding interview resources.

Contributing

Learn from the community.

Feel free to submit pull requests to help:

• Fix errors
• Improve sections
• Add new sections

Content that needs some polishing is placed under development.

Review the Contributing Guidelines.