System Design

Curated books, repositories, blogs, courses, and papers for learning system design and distributed systems.

Resources for moving from "I can code" to "I can design systems that don't fall over." Mix of interview prep and the deeper distributed-systems foundations.

My own notes and case studies live in the System Design section.

Books

Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann. The single best starting point; covers storage, replication, partitioning, and consensus with rare clarity. (dataintensive.net)
System Design Interview, Vol. 1 & 2 — Alex Xu. Interview-focused, with worked examples and clear diagrams.
Understanding Distributed Systems — Roberto Vitillo. A concise, modern tour of the fundamentals.
Database Internals — Alex Petrov. How storage engines and distributed databases actually work under the hood.

Repositories & guides

System Design Primer - The canonical open-source study guide; start here
ByteByteGo - Alex Xu's diagrams, newsletter, and courses

Blogs & references

High Scalability - Real-world architecture breakdowns of large systems
Martin Fowler - Patterns and essays on architecture and design
AWS Architecture Center - Reference architectures and well-architected guidance
Google SRE Books - Free books on running reliable production systems
The Architecture of Open Source Applications - How real open-source systems are built

Lectures & Videos

MIT 6.824 - MIT's course on distributed systems
Hello Interview - A YouTube channel with resources about system design

Papers

Papers We Love — Papers from the computer science community
MapReduce — A paper on Google's large-scale data processing model
The Google File System — A paper on Google's distributed file system
Spanner — A paper on Google's globally-distributed database
Raft — A paper on a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log
Worth reading directly: MapReduce, The Google File System, Bigtable, Dynamo, and Spanner, plus Raft for an understandable take on consensus.

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