PHASE 1
Distributed foundations
Partial failure, retries, replication, partitioning, clocks, consensus, and transactions.
Systems Engineering Track
Build production systems you can explain under failure.
A deliberate ten-course sequence for engineers who need to reason from guarantees, measurements, and failure modes across distributed systems, data, cloud, platforms, and architecture.
- Courses
- 10
- Lesson reading
- 31 hours
- Level
- Advanced
PHASE 2
Data and events
Storage engines, isolation, query plans, Kafka ordering, delivery semantics, and schema evolution.
PHASE 3
Cloud and platforms
AWS networking and IAM, managed data, containers, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
PHASE 4
Operate and design
SLOs, tracing, cardinality, capacity estimates, skew, rate limits, and defensible trade-offs.
Recommended sequence
Ten courses, one connected systems spine.
Each course states its prerequisites, uses concrete production incidents, and ends with work you can run or defend in a design review.
Course 01 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Distributed Systems for Production Engineers
Trace lost replies, duplicate charges, slow requests and stale reads through an order and payment case study. Run independent models of retries, tail latency and replication lag, then defend the guarantees and costs of each repair.
Advanced · production systems
35 sections · 2 parts + systems studio
About 165 min reading
- Distributed Systems
- Idempotency
- Consistency and CAP
- Replication
Course 02 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Sharding, Time and Coordination
Split data across machines without creating hotspots, measure what growth costs in bytes moved, and coordinate work when no two clocks agree and a paused process still believes it holds the lock.
Advanced · production systems
30 sections · 2 parts + coordination studio
About 140 min reading
- Partitioning
- Consistent Hashing
- Clocks and Ordering
- Distributed Locks
Course 03 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Consensus, Transactions and Resilience
Trace Paxos and Raft from durable state to quorum decisions, move work between systems that share no transaction, and stop one slow dependency from exhausting every thread.
Advanced · production systems
45 sections · 3 parts + resilience studio
About 185 min reading
- Paxos and Raft
- Outbox and Sagas
- Delivery Semantics
- Resilience Patterns
Course 04 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Databases at Scale
Price a key choice in bytes written, reproduce the isolation anomalies your default level still permits, read the plan that misled the optimiser, and sequence a schema change that stays reversible until the last step.
Advanced · production systems
40 sections · 4 parts + storage studio
About 175 min reading
- Storage Engines
- MVCC and Isolation
- Query Planning
- Caching and Migration
Course 05 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Kafka and Event-Driven Systems
Measure the exact scope of an ordering guarantee, find the consumer count past which more machines do nothing, place your side effect relative to what exactly-once actually covers, and evolve a schema across teams you do not control.
Advanced · production systems
44 sections · 5 parts + event studio
About 220 min reading
- Partitions and Keys
- Consumer and Share Groups
- Delivery Semantics
- Schema Evolution
Course 06 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
AWS Architecture for Backend Engineers
Size an address space against a workload rather than a habit, walk an IAM decision to the layer that made it, place a service on the compute spectrum with its constraint named, and multiply a request path's availability instead of quoting one component's.
Advanced · production systems
38 sections · 4 parts + cloud studio
About 200 min reading
- VPC and Routing
- IAM Evaluation
- Compute Spectrum
- Availability Math
Course 07 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
AWS Data, Messaging and Cost
Explain a throttle that happens with capacity to spare, choose a messaging service by what survives consumption, size a visibility timeout knowing it is only a mitigation, and read a bill as the document that describes your architecture.
Advanced · production systems
37 sections · 4 parts + data studio
About 185 min reading
- Managed Databases
- Hot Partitions
- Queues and Streams
- Cost as Design
Course 08 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Containers, Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code
Order a build so a change rebuilds only what depends on it, tell Pending from throttled from OOMKilled by symptom, put a dependency check where it degrades rather than restarts, and justify every line of a plan's destroy list.
Advanced · production systems
41 sections · 3 parts + platform studio
About 205 min reading
- Image Layers
- Requests and Limits
- Probes
- Terraform State
Course 09 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Observability and Production Engineering
Say which statistic can see which failure and which cannot in principle, price a metric before adding a label, turn an SLO into an alert that fires on damage rather than a threshold, and follow one identifier from a burn alert to the line that explains it.
Advanced · production systems
35 sections · 4 parts + signals studio
About 180 min reading
- Percentiles
- Cardinality
- Error Budgets
- Tracing
Course 10 · Systems Engineering Track
Free preview
Modern System Design
Estimate before you draw and name the assumption the answer turns on, resolve a skewed distribution with a measured threshold, choose a rate limiter by the burst it permits, and state the four-clause trade for every component in a design.
Advanced · production systems
38 sections · 4 parts + design studio
About 200 min reading
- Estimation
- Skew and Thresholds
- Rate Limiting
- Defending a Design
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