// ABOUT
Built to teach.
Ironclad Academy's System Design course is a free field guide to system design — written for engineers who learn best by reading focused, well-illustrated explanations.
What's inside
- Crash Course — twelve modules that cover the prerequisites: networking, databases, caching, queues, consistency, and more. Read these first if you have no system design background.
- Deep-dive articles — focused explanations of patterns and primitives: load balancers, consistent hashing, sharding, replication, CAP theorem, message queues, CDNs, rate limiters.
- FAANG interview problems — 55+ full-system designs, from Twitter, Uber, and YouTube to payment systems, distributed search, and AI/ML platforms — each one walked through requirements, capacity estimation, API design, schema, and architecture.
Tagged for your level
Every article is tagged by difficulty so you can pick what fits:
- Beginner — assumes minimal background, explains every term.
- Intermediate — assumes you know HTTP, SQL, and basic data structures.
- Advanced — assumes you've done the basics; dives into trade-offs and edge cases.
References & inspiration
Heavily inspired by the long tradition of generous system design educators on the open web:
- ByteByteGo's System Design Interview series.
- GeeksforGeeks system design tutorials.
- Karan Pratap Singh's system design notes.
- Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
- Public engineering blogs from Meta, Google, Netflix, Uber, Discord, Stripe.
Ironclad Academy synthesizes these into one place, in our own words, with a futuristic dark theme and a focus on diagrams.