7 Best System Design Courses For Beginners

What is System Design in Software Engineering?

System design is a process that involves defining the system elements, including its architecture, modules, and components, the interfaces between them, and the data it processes. System Design provides sufficient information and details about the system and its components for the implementation of the system to be consistent with architectural entity definitions as defined in models and views.

Why is System Design important?

A System Design acts as a lifesaver. It eliminates the gap between designers and UI engineers, who often duplicate work between teams while working on multiple products. As a result of improved communication between designers and developers, it is possible to save money and time on projects. Additionally, it can make products more intuitive, improve consistency across platforms, and allow engineers and designers to work on bigger problems.

Best System Design Courses, Tutorials. & Certifications

  1. Rocking System Design
  2. Real-Time Mission-Critical Systems Design
  3. Software Architecture & Design of Modern Large Scale Systems
  4. Machine Learning System Design
  5. Mastering the System Design Interview
  6. Incorporating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in Your System Design
  7. Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers

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1. Rocking System Design

It is a comprehensive course featuring scaling, sharding, caching, load balancing, microservices, well-architected frameworks, security, and other design building blocks. The course consists of three major sections - System Design Basics, Reusable Parts of System Design, and Modern Applications System Design.

In this course, you will learn the following:

  • How to answer system design interview questions
  • Discover the pros and cons of different design decisions, bad vs. good answers, pitfalls to avoid, and more from real-world cloud architects.
  • AWS implementation design with Kubernetes, Lambda, API Gateway, EC2, ALB, NLB, etc.
  • Learn about scaling, sharding, hashing, microservices, load balancers, security, well-architected frameworks, and more to overcome any system design challenge.
  • Test your knowledge with up-to-date system design quizzes.

In addition, you will learn tips, tricks, and lessons from real-world Cloud Architects that you can use in interviews and real-life projects, as well as learn how to implement the design using Kubernetes, Lambda, Amazon EC2, and API Gateway on AWS.

  • Course rating: 4.6 out of 5.0 (966 Ratings total)
  • Duration: 8h
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion
Rocking System Design
Learn system design, from building blocks to complex architectures for interviews and real world projects

2. Real-Time Mission-Critical Systems Design

This course will help you distinguish between systems on which you can bet your life (mission critical) and those that provide predictable performance and quality of service (reliable). Students can also earn academic credit for this course through the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree program at CU Boulder.

In this course, you will learn the following:

  • Use of SECDED (Single Error Correction, Double Error Detection) codes for ECC (Error Correction Code) memories.
  • How flash file systems work, including wear leveling and the write amplification metric.
  • Differences and common characteristics of high availability and high reliability.
  • Methods and design for redundant hardware with cross strapping and recovery.

This course will provide learners with the skills and knowledge to apply architectural styles to mission-critical systems, real-time operating systems, and mixed-hard and soft real-time systems, as well as the ability to comprehend hardware/software interfaces and hardware abstraction layers (HAL, BSP) from a resource perspective.

  • Course rating: 4.6 out of 5.0 (2,505 total enrollments)
  • Duration: 50 hours
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion
Real-Time Mission-Critical Systems Design
Offered by University of Colorado Boulder. This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5317, part of CU Boulder’s Master of ... Enroll for free.

3. Software Architecture & Design of Modern Large Scale Systems

It is the best resource for anyone interested in becoming a Software Architect or if you are already one and want a refresher course. During this practical course, you will learn how to architect real-world systems scalable to millions of daily users and process and store petabytes of information.

In this course, you will learn the following:

  • Learn Software Architecture of large-scale systems capable of handling millions of requests/per day.
  • Design highly scalable, highly available, and performant software systems.
  • Apply industry-proven software architectural patterns, building blocks, and best practices.
  • Define the system's technical requirements, high-level components, and API.
  • Gain confidence for an upcoming System Design Interview.

Also, this is a great place to prepare for an upcoming System Design Interview and gain confidence. The course will teach you how to identify the technical system requirements without missing any details, define simple APIs that are easy to use, follow industry-proven Software Architecture Patterns, and more.

  • Course rating: 4.6 out of 5.0 (1,433 Ratings total)
  • Duration: 5h 32m
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion
Software Architecture & Design of Modern Large Scale Systems
Become a Software Architect or Technical Lead by Mastering Software Architecture, System Design & Big Data Processing.

4. Machine Learning System Design

In any ML interview, Machine Learning System Design is an integral part. It helps you stand out among hundreds of other candidates if you can identify problems, identify requirements, and discuss tradeoffs. Therefore in this course, you will learn about best practices for applying machine learning models in production at scale and the state of the practice of model techniques.

This System Design course includes:

  • Machine Learning Primer
  • Video Recommendation
  • Feed Ranking
  • Ad Click Prediction
  • Rental Search Ranking
  • Estimate Food Delivery Time

After you complete the course, you will have the opportunity to apply and leverage knowledge from top tech researchers. As a result of reading hundreds of the latest research papers and industry papers, you will be up to date on model techniques. Your depth of knowledge may surprise the interviewers. Additionally, you will learn Machine Learning and get an overview.

  • Duration: 1h 30m
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion

5. Mastering the System Design Interview

This course will help you ace your next systems design interview. During this course, you will learn how to conduct an effective interview with a former hiring manager from Amazon who spoke with thousands of people and hired hundreds of software engineers.

In this course, you will learn the following:

  • Practice working through real-world system design interview questions.
  • Apply horizontal scaling to transactions, data storage, analytics, and databases.
  • Choose appropriate algorithms and data structures for system designs.
  • Structure your interview responses to ensure the best outcomes
  • Approach system design problems from the right angles, and with the right questions.
  • Address the soft skills your interviewer is secretly evaluating you on.

Throughout this course, you will learn what your interviewer is looking for and what technology you should have a working knowledge of. In addition, you'll get six mock system design interviews with real-world interview questions from top tech companies.

  • Course rating: 4.7 out of 5.0 (3,981 Ratings total)
  • Duration: 4h 47m
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion
Mastering the System Design Interview
Insider tips for your system design interview from a former Amazon hiring manager – plus 6 mock interviews for practice!

6. Incorporating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in Your System Design

Managing apps in production is the new hot thing - but are you and your systems prepared for it? In this course, you'll learn how to design systems efficiently and effectively, find the gaps in your current system design, and adapt to SRE smoothly and effectively.

Your systems must be designed to work well with SRE before implementing them. With this course, you'll gain a deeper understanding of SRE by designing systems and assessing what you're missing in your existing systems.

This course includes:

  • Architecting Systems for Reliability
  • Designing Observability for Fault Diagnosis
  • Driving Continuous Improvement with Service Levels

First, you will learn how to architect apps for reliability so that temporary problems can resolve automatically, and bigger problems can be detected immediately. After that, you will discover how observability design supports SRE and can assist you in getting your apps back online quickly.

Lastly, you'll learn how to measure and report service levels effectively. By the time you finish this course, you'll know how to design systems that bring your applications into SRE.

  • Course rating: 4.3 out of 5.0 Ratings total
  • Duration: 1h 37m
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion
Incorporating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in Your System Design
SRE is the hot way to manage apps in production - but are you and your systems ready for it? This course teaches you how to design systems for maximum reliability, find the gaps in your current system design and adopt SRE smoothly and effectively.

7. Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers

The course provides a bottom-up approach to scaling systems. As a first step, you'll learn about the components of modern systems, each of which is a fully scalable application on its own. Then, you'll examine the reshaded framework for designing web-scale applications by determining requirements, constraints, and assumptions. As a final step, you will combine these modular building blocks into several popular services.

In this course, you will learn the following:

  • Designing complex systems using a microservice architecture using various building blocks.
  • Deep understanding of project requirements and constraints.
  • Adaptable framework for engineers and managers to solve problems in modern system design.
  • Understanding the construction of various popular web-scale services.
  • Solving any novel problem with a robust system design approach using this course as a guide.

This course will empower engineers, architects, and product managers to solve complex problems from an alternative perspective. Once you complete the course, you will be able to design larger, scalable systems capable of maintaining availability even as users grow.

  • Course rating: 4.7 out of 5.0 (2,041 Ratings total)
  • Duration: 8h 55m
  • Certificate: Certificate on completion

Thank you for reading this. We hope our course curation would help you to pick the right course to learn System Design.

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