Grokking System Design - Foundation

Career Catalyst

Master System Design from Theory to Production

You don't learn system design from textbooks — you learn from solving real problems. How does Netflix handle video streaming at scale? How does Uber route millions of rides? How does Slack deliver messages instantly? Grokking System Design – Foundation Track teaches through real-world scenarios and case studies.

124 scenario-driven case studies covering:

✅ Database design, sharding, replication

✅ Caching with Redis configuration

✅ Microservices with Spring Boot & Kubernetes

✅ Message queues with Kafka

✅ Load balancing with NGINX

✅ Monitoring with Prometheus

Every scenario includes: production problem, architectural approaches, design patterns, decision frameworks, tool configurations, and interview-ready explanations. Learn through real-world case studies — from Google, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, and top tech companies. Your journey from developer to designers begins here — with scenarios you'll face and tools you can deploy.

Sameer Paradkar

Master System Design from Theory to Production

124 scenario-driven case studies covering:

✅ Database design, sharding, replication

✅ Caching with Redis configuration

✅ Microservices with Spring Boot & Kubernetes

✅ Message queues with Kafka

✅ Load balancing with NGINX

✅ Monitoring with Prometheus

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$16.00

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$16.00

Author earns

$12.80

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About the Book

Grokking System Design – Foundation Track is the first step in mastering the craft of designing scalable and reliable software systems. It focuses on core architectural principles, trade-off reasoning, and practical implementation — giving you both the mental scaffolding to think like a systems engineer AND the hands-on skills to build production-ready systems.

What makes this guide unique is its dual approach: you'll learn foundational concepts (Why use caching? When to scale horizontally?) alongside practical tool implementation (How do I configure Redis Cluster? How do I set up Kafka topics?). This bridges the gap that most engineers face — understanding architectural theory but struggling to implement it with real tools.

While advanced system design involves balancing consistency models or replication factors across distributed systems, the Foundation Track teaches why these problems exist in the first place — through intuitive examples, scenario-driven reasoning, and hands-on tool configuration.

This guide is your architectural sandbox: experiment, learn, reason, implement, and most importantly, build the habit of thinking and building in systems.

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About the Author

Sameer Paradkar

Sameer Paradkar is an enterprise architect with more than 20+ years of diversified experience in the ICT industry encompassing System Integration, Product Development, and Advisory roles. Certified and Competent in different engagement methodologies and frameworks e.g. TOGAF, NGOSS, ITIL, COBIT, Agile, Scrum, DevOps, Scaled Agile Framework and Domain Driven Design. He is a subject matter expert on large scale complex architecture transformation and modernization domains. He has worked on multiple architecture transformations and modernization opportunities world-wide that presented a phased roadmap to the transformation that maximized the business value while minimizing costs and risks.

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