Module outcome
Design fault-tolerant ingress routing, prevent cache stampedes and avalanches, choose optimal storage engines (B-Tree vs LSM), and partition data with consistent hashing.
Module 2 · Component Architecture
The internal mechanics, scaling boundaries, and failure modes of infrastructure primitives: load balancers, API gateways, caches, CDNs, storage engines, and message brokers.
Lesson plan
Design fault-tolerant ingress routing, prevent cache stampedes and avalanches, choose optimal storage engines (B-Tree vs LSM), and partition data with consistent hashing.
Module 1 (Foundations & Mental Models) or solid knowledge of network latency and Little’s Law.
Infrastructure components are specialized trade-off engines. Caches trade memory for read latency; message brokers trade immediate execution for durable decoupling; load balancers trade hop latency for horizontal throughput.
Module challenge
Architect an end-to-end data pipeline capable of ingesting 200,000 writes/sec, routing through an L4/L7 balancer tier, caching reads via Redis Cluster, and persisting to an LSM-tree database.