Workbook: System Design

One activity per class, to do on paper: all 16 classes, from requirements and back-of-the-envelope estimates to the classic interview problems. Each activity opens with the class question and a short summary of what you need to know, followed by exercises of increasing difficulty (warm-up, practice and challenge): estimates by hand, Little's Law and utilization, percentiles and fan-out, availability in series and in parallel, hit ratios, quorums, partitions and consumers, error budgets and burn rates, capacity and cost, design sketches with the components of the simulator palette, trade-offs to defend and failures to diagnose. Boxes with a QR code open the matching scenario of the System Design Playground. Worked answers are at the end of the workbook, with the reasoning and the most common mistake.

Use it to review after each class, to prepare for the exams and to practise for system-design interviews. While you work, the cheat sheet has the method, the formulas, the numbers and the components on eight pages.

Download the workbook (PDF) Cheat sheet

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