awesome-system-design-resources

ashishps1’s curated collection of system-design learning material. 40.2k stars, 8.6k forks, GPL-3.0. The trigger source for this spoke: it completed a cluster two parked records had been holding since 2026-06-15.

What it covers

Organized hierarchically by topic, each concept linking out to an explanation or video:

• Core concepts — scalability, availability, reliability, CAP theorem, consistent hashing.
• Networking — OSI model, DNS, proxies, HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/UDP, load balancing.
• APIs — REST vs GraphQL, WebSockets, webhooks, rate limiting.
• Databases — ACID, SQL vs NoSQL, sharding, replication.
• Caching — strategies, eviction policies, CDNs.
• Distributed systems — consensus, service discovery, circuit breakers.
• Architectural patterns — microservices, serverless, event-driven.

Plus 25+ easy, 23+ medium and 12+ hard system-design problems with worked solutions.

It is a bibliography, not a book

Almost nothing here is written by the maintainer. The repository aggregates blog posts, YouTube videos, papers and engineering write-ups from companies including Discord, Netflix and Stripe — a meta-curriculum in the same sense as coding-interview-university, and subject to the same problem: you can see what it collected and never what it rejected.

The exam is stated, not implied

This source does not pretend to be a general education. It ships a framework titled “How to Answer a System Design Interview Problem,” grades its practice set by difficulty, and points at courses and newsletters aimed at interview readiness. interview-preparation is the organizing principle and the repository says so.

Tier: T3, with the interest declared

The maintainer operates AlgoMaster, an educational platform selling system-design content, and this repository is the free tier and funnel for it. That is an ordinary arrangement and it is exactly the “vendor / self-interested” case in the ladder — usable for what is offered, flagged promotional. Nothing here is independent of the person selling the course.

Related

meta-curriculum · interview-preparation · coding-interview-university · ai-engineering-from-scratch