🛠️ 8-Week Beginner-Friendly System Design Roadmap

Hey there 👋

👋 Introduction

System Design often feels overwhelming. There’s talk of scalability, load balancers, sharding, microservices, and more. But if you’re just starting, you don’t need to learn it all at once.

This roadmap is an 8-week beginner-friendly guide that breaks down big ideas into daily bite-sized blogs, with small projects along the way. You’ll not only understand the theory but also build things to apply your learning.

At the end, we’ll wrap everything up with a Capstone Project where you’ll design and build the architecture for a real-world scalable app.

🗓️ The Plan

Here’s the week-by-week breakdown:

Week 1: Foundations of System Design

• What is System Design? Why it matters
• Client-Server Model
• HTTP, REST, APIs
• DNS, IP, Load basics
  📌 Mini Project: Simple URL Shortener API

Week 2: Scalability & Load Handling

• Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
• Load Balancers
• Reverse Proxies (Nginx, HAProxy)
• CDN Basics
  📌 Mini Project: Deploy a static website with Nginx + simple load balancing

Week 3: Databases & Storage

• Relational vs NoSQL databases
• CAP Theorem
• Database Replication & Partitioning
• Caching (Redis, Memcached)
  📌 Mini Project: Caching Layer for an API (Express + Redis)

Week 4: Consistency, Availability & Reliability

• Eventual consistency vs Strong consistency
• Consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos basics)
• Quorum reads/writes
• High availability systems
  📌 Mini Project: Replicated key-value store (mock in Node.js)

Week 5: Messaging & Async Systems

• Message Queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS)
• Pub/Sub systems
• Task queues & background jobs
• Event-driven design
  📌 Mini Project: Job queue system with BullMQ + Redis

Week 6: Microservices & APIs

• Monolith vs Microservices
• Service-to-service communication
• API Gateways
• Service Discovery
  📌 Mini Project: Microservice-based Todo App (users, tasks)

Week 7: Security & Monitoring

• Authentication & Authorization
• Rate Limiting & Throttling
• Logging & Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana)
• Alerts & Health checks
  📌 Mini Project: Secure Notes API with rate-limiting + logging

Week 8: Bringing It All Together

• Design process & trade-offs
• Case studies (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube scale)
• Common interview patterns (Feed system, chat system, search system)
• Mock Design Interview Walkthrough
  📌 Mini Project: Design a scalable chat/messaging system

🎓 Capstone Project

Scalable Social Media Backend

• Users, posts, feeds, likes, comments
• Microservices for users, feed, notifications
• Redis caching + database partitioning
• Load balancing + CDN for assets
• Logging, monitoring, rate-limiting

📅 Week by Week Breakdown

🔑 Legend:

• 🌱 Foundations
• ⚡ Scalability
• 🗄️ Databases
• 🔒 Consistency
• 📬 Messaging
• 🧩 Microservices
• 🛡️ Security
• 🚀 Full Design

💡 How We’ll Learn

• Concept First – Simple explanations & diagrams.
• Daily Blogs – Bite-sized learning (15–20 mins).
• Projects – Apply concepts with Node/Express demos.
• Case Studies – Real-world systems at scale.
• Capstone – Bring it all together in a final project.

🎯 End Goal

By the end of 8 weeks, you’ll:

• Understand how to design scalable, reliable systems.
• Be comfortable with caching, load balancing, databases, and microservices.
• Have multiple mini-projects + a capstone project for your portfolio.
• Be ready to approach system design interviews with confidence.

📌 Each daily blog will be linked here once it’s published. Think of this as the master roadmap.

Ready? Let’s dive in → Week 1, Day 1: What is System Design?