Hands-On: Advanced System Design

Moving beyond basic system design requires understanding the exact mechanisms that keep distributed architectures running when networks fail and traffic spikes. This course is a rigorous examination of advanced architectural patterns, built around concrete diagrams. You will start by tackling distributed state, exploring leader election among replicas, quorum reads and writes, and distributed locks. From there, the course breaks down complex data workflows, showing you how to implement Sagas using both orchestration and choreography, build Event Sourcing systems with snapshots, and construct Change Data Capture pipelines. We then separate the command and query paths with CQRS and handle the realities of eventual consistency and derived read models. Because messages inevitably fail, you will also learn how to guarantee reliable processing using idempotency keys, the outbox pattern, deduplication windows, and dead-letter queues for poison messages.

With the core data patterns established, the course shifts to protecting, scaling, and operating your architecture. You will learn how to defend your services against cascading failures using circuit breakers, timeout budgets, and load shedding, while ensuring high availability through active-passive failover across availability zones. We cover global scale by examining active-active multi-region deployments, resolving concurrent cross-region writes, and maintaining data residency. You will also explore real-time pipelines, including stateful stream processors, windowed aggregation, and exactly-once processing. Security and isolation are addressed at every layer, from network segmentation and envelope encryption to zero-trust communication via a service mesh with mutual TLS. Finally, you will see how to safely deploy, evolve, and monitor these systems using backward-compatible contract evolution, canary releases, distributed tracing, and SLO-based alerting with error budgets, ensuring you can manage a highly available, multi-tenant platform with per-tenant quotas and role-based access control.