System Design for Beginners Course

This course is a detailed introduction to system design for software developers and engineers.
Building large-scale distributed systems like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter requires an in-depth understanding of computer science principles. This allows systems to handle millions of users concurrently despite hardware failures.
We discuss the fundamental concepts of system design in this course like requirement selection, API design, Database Design, Network protocols, Fault-tolerance, design trade-offs, solution tradeoffs, and low-level design.
Gaurav Sen created this course. Check out his channel: @gkcs
You can learn about distributed systems and system design using the following resources:
Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann: amzn.to/3SyNAOy
System Design Simplified: interviewready.io
Let us know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!
⭐️ Contents ⭐️
⌨️ (0:00:00) What is System Design
⌨️ (0:02:27) Design Patterns
⌨️ (0:04:07) Live Streaming System Design
⌨️ (0:07:42) Fault Tolerance
⌨️ (0:08:32) Extensibility
⌨️ (0:09:49) Testing
⌨️ (0:10:32) Summarizing the requirements
⌨️ (0:11:27) Core requirement - Streaming video
⌨️ (0:14:52) Diagramming the approaches
⌨️ (0:17:12) API Design
⌨️ (0:20:02) Database Design
⌨️ (0:22:32) Network Protocols
⌨️ (0:29:07) Choosing a Datastore
⌨️ (0:32:57) Uploading Raw Video Footage
⌨️ (0:34:37) Map Reduce for Video Transformation
⌨️ (0:39:24) WebRTC vs. MPEG DASH vs. HLS
⌨️ (0:41:55) Content Delivery Networks
⌨️ (0:42:27) High-Level Summary
⌨️ (0:44:48) Introduction to Low-Level Design
⌨️ (0:47:00) Video Player Design
⌨️ (0:49:17) Engineering requirements
⌨️ (0:50:32) Use case UML diagram
⌨️ (1:02:32) Class UML Diagram
⌨️ (1:06:27) Sequence UML Diagram
⌨️ (1:11:49) Coding the Server
⌨️ (1:24:23) Resources for System Design
🎉 Thanks to our Champion and Sponsor supporters:
👾 Nattira Maneerat
👾 Heather Wcislo
👾 Serhiy Kalinets
👾 Erdeniz Unvan
👾 Justin Hual
👾 Agustín Kussrow
👾 Otis Morgan
--
Learn to code for free and get a developer job: www.freecodecamp.org
Read hundreds of articles on programming: freecodecamp.org/news

[@potatocoder5090]

FreeCodeCamp is amazing! Only yesterday, I was learning Assembly Programming with ARM for beginners on this channel, and today there's a system design course already waiting for me! Thank you Gaurav for creating such a thorough resource for free and FreeCodeCamp for bringing it to millions of learners like me :)

[@tolufindsyourhome]

Thanks Gaurav, Glad to have you here. I worked on many case studies of your classes and has tremendously helped in getting my system design skill to an advance user over the last few months.

[@KejriwalBhakt]

Just to let others know, Gaurav has started his own startup and is being helped by the startup cell of Maharashtra state to smoothen out the process.

[@rachitshukla7111]

Context?

[@ankitrawat06]

​@@rachitshukla7111 koi context nhi h bas likhna h

[@rachitshukla7111]

@@ankitrawat06 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[@neowantsword]

Thanks bro😌🙏

[@thranduillord001]

kejru to pakda gaya bhai

[@TheEvolvingEngineer]

I am not even a software engineer but the way he started explaining things make so much sense to me and made me stick to the video till the very end. Gaurav knows who make it engaging. Kudos to FCC and Gaurav!!

[@sailendrapamidi]

Exactly my thoughts.

[@magicmedia7950]

That is what system design is all about. It's meant to be understood by the layman. Surprisingly the most important part of programming is not in writing the code rather it's solving a problem using logical sequence that captures everything problem solution(system design). If you are not good at this then programming may not be for you!

[@illuminatidaylight8566]

I want to get placed as a software Engineer so for this should i learn system design ?? Is this video good for a starter ?

[@tazzyw]

@@magicmedia7950 well said

[@mma-dost]

sorry for the late reply but learn system design at the start may be interesting for starting but you need to learn how to write code and make good projects.@@illuminatidaylight8566

[@Sandeep-zd6dq]

Now I will start my system design journey with this course.

[@marvelousadesina4673]

Big thanks to everyone at FCC for their efforts in making these videos

[@mrsbootsworkouts]

I really liked this course. it includes not just the patterns, but also connects it to the process of distilling Business Needs as an engineer. Thank you for sharing this course! Excellent point about testing the design, especially for large complex systems.

[@aldrinseanpereira140]

Gaurav hats off to your wonderful course!

[@juffler463]

I know all this but I was doubting my self that, Is my way of system design is right. Now I am more confident thanks 🙂

[@chauvoluuhuong7485]

For me, it is not about SQL or noSQL It is more about: - Is it cheap? is it scaleable? at this stage of the project can I utilize my available resource? - Do we need schemaless/no schemaless, usually because of shameless, the database needs to take more space for storing and is slower at execution. Like dynamic-typed langue vs typed language. - Can I make relationship ? (typically the NoSQL is considered weak relationship, BUT YOU CAN STILL MAKE RELATIONSHIP. PLUS, BECAUSE OF SCHEMALESS YOU CAN EMBED DOCUMENT FOR MAKING THE RELATIONSHIP AND MAKING THE QUERY FASTER WITHOUT JOINING ACROSS TABLES ) - How about its built-in function? it is usually better if you make the computation on the database instead of pulling it down to the server and computing and of course, you don't have to re-develop that function - The last one, of course, which type of database is more familiar to my team

[@domisPL_01]

i believe you mean "schemas" , not "schemaless"?

[@nobytes2]

In terms of databases you really only have a few types, NoSQL, SQL, and in-memory. The brand of the db is almost irrelevant any decent engineer should know how to work with any of them.

[@utsavnangalia7580]

Great Tutorial, videos like these really make a difference. Thank you for the efforts Gaurav and the team at FCC.

[@rustam-z]

Nice short introduction to system design! Nice job Gaurav!

[@debmalyamitra353]

Yup Gourav Sen, the OG of system design, no surprises there!!

[@horacinis]

Gaurav Sen***

[@ankush8270]

​@@horacinisGaurav Senpai😅

[@Vancouver2010BC]

A large scale system design for beginners with no experience!! And they will hire you as a Senior System Analyst too. Good luck in your career!

[@amankumarjha8155]

The knowledge and versatility of Gaurav is just amazing, I m stunn

[@michaelwarren8354]

"You want your features to be extensible. For this, you have to take out your engineering crystal ball, and gaze deeply into it..." 😂🤣

[@TheJohndward01]

This is an amazing tutorial, thank you FCC!

[@founder8372]

Excellent course, thank you! I really wish though that the audio quality was better

[@Tommypants]

This is exactly what I need. Thank you!!!

[@rajeevsinha2670]

One of the best videos i have where it explains all nuances of system design from front end to back end, how APIs work, DB, network, protocols etc. 👏👍

[@illuminatidaylight8566]

I want to get placed as a software Engineer so do I have to learn system design ? Should I watch this course ?

[@khyatichaudhary4083]

​@@illuminatidaylight8566This course is not sufficient. Yes,you need to study.

[@illuminatidaylight8566]

​@@khyatichaudhary4083thank you for replying 😊 So do you have the idea about the sufficient ones ??

[@fabio.1]

👀

[@johnroca338]

Wowow! Super informative! Better than I had in my school!

[@prashlovessamosa]

Already learnt form this legend

[@mikedelta658]

Thank you, the one and only Gaurav Sen!!! From Ethiopia

[@gkcs]

Thank you!

[@akumarsingh85]

Wow just what I was looking for this year!!

[@xuutee]

Frame is good for video data, as a random video ID and data too. On youtube commercials are helping, clicking on a feed too. I was thinking about this years ago. Good work! Time between searching on videos in big platfroms helps, but smaller video streamers are not so complicated, useful goal keeper behavior is better inside the box.

[@priyan8004]

Who knew the power of free knowledge ! Thanks man for all the effort.

[@IsxaaqAcademy]

I typed it on the search box, and you have uploaded it 5 hrs ago, Delightful!

[@PrantikNoor]

Thanks for this course. It will help to design my project better.

[@alexmagnitov7324]

Please, do something about architectures like layered, event-driven, etc. To a newbie like me it’s really complicated to build highly responsive projects.

[@gkcs]

I have a video on event driven architectures on my channel.

[@arnoldbhebhe]

Hi @gkcs! Thank you for the amazing content. Your videos have been super helpful in helping me understand system design!

[@gkcs]

Thank you!

[@arnoldbhebhe]

@@gkcs you're welcome! Do you have any project recommendations that can help with mastering these skills?

[@Tridib_Tinkel]

Most precious gift for the web developers!

[@lewismuriungi4564]

Just started the video, so far so good, should be the first step when thinking of creating software

[@minhlhq62]

Thank you so much! Very great content!

[@shloksuman8164]

Pretty well summed up by him , helpful for beginners like me

[@NoNTr1v1aL]

Nice Microservices reference! 😂

[@egbolives123]

This was a very educative course! highly recommended

[@divyanshupandey4041]

best gaurav sen system design video ever

[@CodeSnap01]

gaurav is an inspiration to many

[@JN-of7mf]

Great Video! One question. In the getFrame() method, can we just divide the given timestamp by Frame.FrameTime, to get the index to the array of frames ? Instead of looping to find the frame ?

[@jmbert0]

You posted this at the perfect time thank you

[@adrianbitsinnie1537]

For Real!! I didn't notice it was posted 7 hours ago but it is such perfect timing for me

[@i_am_dumb1070]

I am thinking of making a basic video sharing and streaming platform for personal projection and this really helped me a lot thankyou

[@cemunlu9552]

i have exam about information systems and this contains the subject thankss!!!

[@JackSparrow-tv3mo]

Love u , searching this topics from long time.

[@askholia]

A fantastic resource for any newer software engineers.

[@kush501]

Thanks you sir!!!

[@Srishti9015]

I am still going through the video, but just wanted to say thanks so much for making content like this. It's so well thought out and articulated. I am a mid-level engineer and I have a rough, abstract understanding of most of these concepts but I need the nitty gritty to be reinforced so that I can talk about it confidently. You covered exactly that in your example. Thanks Gaurav and thanks freecodecamp for another video that hits the nail on the head

[@borisv8766]

Excellent walkthrough! Nitpicking: at 33:37 RTMP must be arrow-connected to the "video" table, not to the "user".

[@sherwinmontanez5481]

Kudos to this man!😊😊😊 I learn a lot in your system design course. It's a good video to watch in 2024

[@jamialhasan9203]

Teaching something simple thing in complex way dose not really mean learning system design, rather knowing philosophy behind a system or process is more important.

[@tusharys9404]

I agree to this

[@techwithbube]

Awesome content. I really enjoyed this

[@umehmoses8118]

This is wonderful. Much love from Nigeria

[@jelonidas7772]

I've been waiting for that! thx FCC!

[@user-vv7po3zq4x]

Liked it. Very informative in an easy-to-understand way!

[@theobaldigberaese4572]

Great work ✅

[@nikkis8102]

Hands down the best system design course ever. Thanks so much!!!!

[@lemonjuice6177]

Bro this is nuts

[@ivanfoofoo]

What's nuts? xD

[@harsh9558]

Awesome video! Really enjoyed through the video

[@visheshgupta4990]

Thankyou so Much , This is a very informative video , this videos takes us on a journey where we think deeply which we never thought before , How in detail a engineer thinks about every aspect from making a call for next 10 seconds video frame , and all the various parts to make sure for a user the complete experience is so smooth and he never bother about it ... Thankyou so Much it is a great video to start learning about system design , It is interesting and Informative 🔥🔥

[@joseantoniojose7933]

Thanks a helpful and intersting video of all these systems topics... Very good...

[@noahhradek5426]

thank you for this. System design is on interviews and there are very few resources.

[@gkcs]

You can also try InterviewReady for system design interviews.

[@artyomnomnom]

It would be great having subtitles for such important topic

[@BestURLShortenerBioPageQRCode]

Really really awesome video. Thank you for this tutorial! This is exactly what I have been looking for.👍👍👍

[@achiver]

Really I wait for that course so long

[@aammssaamm]

Try reading books. 😂

[@zohebahmed6733]

Nothing much to say, Just happy to see Gaurav Sen :3

[@sinikp3015]

Thank you Gaurav . Excellent content ❤

[@illuminatidaylight8566]

Is this really helpful?? I want to become a software Engineer so should I watch this ??

[@thymos6575]

@@illuminatidaylight8566 yes why not

[@mahendranath2504]

Thank you so much ❤😂🎉👏🙏🏻🤔🤝👌👍

[@chrisrockscode1202]

Yeah I totally could have used this video last year when I was deep into my capstone project, except I was trying to figure out all this stuff with my team trying to come up with a very similar program, our conversations were very similar to everything in this video… we weren’t able actually make a viable product tho, this would have been a great help… we were missing some of the late video processing parts that were very complex to get implemented and working

[@kaushikdr]

For "Go back to video and watch from timestamp", couldn't it be `play(user, videoID, 0)` where if it is 0, you check your cache to see if the user saw it previously? I also think that watched video shouldn't be a separate object because it doesn't make sense to create a new object every time a user watches a video. Instead, I think there should be a database table for watched videos with userID, seekTime, and videoID that can be queried in the VideoConsumingService.

[@user-fi2ty4bm2n]

This course is decent! I learned this course in my degree, and it cost 3500 USD. Huges thanks to Gaurav Sen and freeCodeCamp.

[@jhonsen9842]

He is Gaurav. The God Of System Design.

[@grotsunfull]

nice job!

[@Lost1nTranslation]

Thank you!

[@pavanrayudu3031]

great tutorial for beginners

[@50kT]

What whiteboard software is he/you using for this 17:23, I noticed boxes automatically get squared up and lined clearly. I've got a drawing tablet and want to implement this into my workflow and looking for some good whiteboard software.

[@MrKrishnanandaKHegde]

Great! Thanks a lot! Which tool did you use for drawing in the first and second part of the video? Are you using a tab or digital pad for writing?

[@sriharshan9788]

It's lucid chart

[@MrKrishnanandaKHegde]

@@sriharshan9788 oh okay..

[@MadalinIgnisca]

Hi Gaurav. Thank you for sharing such a nice course. May I ask what software you use to edit your videos, as I do see lot's of open source touch to it?

[@gkcs]

It's Microsoft Whiteboard.

[@akhzarnazir]

Thanks Gaurav, Salam from Lahore, Pakistan

[@shiwamsinha7076]

very fruitful video

[@shubhamsingh-gb5zh]

Very good explanation

[@ekanshmishra4517]

Hey can someone explain where are some good resources to study these protocols like MPEG DASH, HLS and other web rtc and so on.. I haven't heard about them😶I want to know everything about them and where are they used.

[@kyzmitch2]

thanks, great video, probably coding is not a part of a system design and not sure about spending that much time on the specific use cases, because I'm guessing each use case could be a separate system or described as a separate system design

[@fotoflo]

Fantastic course! Thank you. Curious what your setup is for the drawing stuff part - are you using an iPad + pencil? with what software?

[@AnkushBisht]

Microsoft Whiteboard. He mentioned in a reply to one of the older comments.

[@bobobobo-ki2fw]

fantastic do you have a course with AWS node?

[@lishingchan1075]

thanks for this video! I am a PM and would like to understand how developers work. Would you have a recommendation on the time taken for each stage: api design, database design, protocol before implementation?

[@sathvikvutukuri9179]

Oscar award for Best system designer.

[@jatinnandwani6678]

Thanks so much

[@sohamvishwas6795]

Thank you :)

[@mllenessmarie]

Holy cow, is that Galactus? Great easter egg, guys!

[@rishiraj2548]

Great thanks

[@polarbear986]

The tutor is amazing

[@SatyaUpendra]

Good to see @gkcs here

[@lets_learn_some_tech5542]

What software is used to draw those use case ? : it's LucidChart

[@megamaxdevelopment9890]

Great video !

[@vimalalwaysrocks]

1:18:47.. isnt the timestamp condition inverted? Shouldn't it be if (frames[i].timestamp >= timestamp && frames[i].timestamp + Frame.frameTime < timestamp)? Great tutorial btw

[@yashukumar4713]

Prerequisites for understanding the concepts is some sort of APIs Knowledgs, Networking Protocol, Database System. Just need basic concepsts.

[@alfazjikani7022]

Thanks!

[@6_nikki_9]

Very interesting.

[@jairajsahgal7101]

Thank you

[@_seeker423]

I think overall the content was great. But I am not sure if example of video processing and serving was well suited for beginners.

[@irfanadamm5819]

great for viewing from ux designer point of view

[@aceintheblackhole]

i like the idea of Brad Pitt posting on LinkedIn :D great course, thank you ;)