System Design Course: Complete Production Architecture

By Mukul Raina

Created by Mukul Raina (Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead at Microsoft, Oxford MSc), this course bridges the gap between interview-level design and real-world production systems operating at scale. It covers the five constraints that shape every system (availability, latency, cost, team structure, compliance) and dives deep into production-critical topics: safe database schema migrations (adding/removing/renaming columns, dual-write patterns, online schema tools like pt-osc/gh-ost), replication & consistency (leader-follower, failover, sagas, hot partitions), backup & disaster recovery (RPO/RTO, point-in-time recovery), caching (thundering herd, hot key problems, CDN invalidation), message queues (idempotency, exponential backoff with jitter, dead letter queues), reliability patterns (timeouts, retry budgets, circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, load shedding), and health checks & chaos engineering—providing the production-depth thinking needed for Staff-level engineering roles.