System Design Fundamentals
Why colleges run this
System-design rounds now appear even in fresher interviews; students who can reason about scale and defend a design stand out immediately.
Course outcomes
CO1
Explain the trade-offs between latency, throughput and consistency in a distributed system
K2CO2
Apply load balancing, caching and replication to scale a service
K3CO3
Select a data store appropriate to a stated access pattern
K4CO4
Design a queue-based flow for an asynchronous workload
K3CO5
Justify a system design against stated scale and reliability requirements
K5Modules tap a module for its theory & lab
Hours shown are the recommended 3-day format — module time scales to the duration you pick.
01Design fundamentals4 h
Theory
Requirements, back-of-envelope estimation, latency vs throughput, trade-offs
Lab
Estimate the load for a named product
Output
Estimation worksheet
02Scaling and load balancing4 h
Theory
Horizontal scaling, load balancers, statelessness
Lab
Redesign a single-server app to scale out
Output
Scaled architecture sketch
03Caching and databases4 h
Theory
Cache strategies, SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, replication
Lab
Choose and justify a data store for a scenario
Output
Data-store decision note
04Messaging and queues4 h
Theory
Asynchronous processing, message queues, decoupling
Lab
Design a queue-based flow for a spike workload
Output
Async flow diagram
05Reliability4 h
Theory
Redundancy, failover, rate limiting, monitoring
Lab
Add reliability to the running design
Output
Reliability checklist applied
06Design workshop and defence4 h
Theory
End-to-end system design, presenting and defending trade-offs
Lab
Teams design a scalable system and present it
Output
System design + defence
Every participant receives
Certificate of completion Course material LMS access Interview question bank Mock interview & viva practice Optional nasscom NSQF assessment