Master the art of building scalable, reliable, and intelligent systems — from fundamentals to AI-powered microservices.
Welcome to the ultimate roadmap for mastering System Design, Microservices, DevOps, and AI-powered architecture. Whether you're a beginner learning the basics or an experienced engineer aiming to scale up to 10M+ QPS with AI and distributed systems — this guide is designed for progressive learning with real-world relevance.
Inside, you'll find curated topics, patterns, tools, and best practices organized by difficulty level — covering everything from RESTful APIs and database scaling to GenAI agents and DevSecOps.
- Importance of system design
- High-Level Design (HLD) vs Low-Level Design (LLD)
- Monolithic vs Microservices architecture
- Client-server model
- HTTP Request/Response cycle
- RESTful APIs
- IP, DNS, TCP, UDP, HTTP/HTTPS
- Ports and firewalls
- Load balancer basics
- RDBMS vs NoSQL
- Basic schema design
- Indexes and query optimization
- CAP Theorem (Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance)
- Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
- Load balancing concepts
- CDNs
- Reverse proxies
- In-memory caches (Redis, Memcached)
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Replication
- Sharding
- Read vs Write DB separation
- Choosing SQL vs NoSQL
- Message Queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS)
- Background workers
- Pub/Sub pattern
- Object storage (S3, GCP)
- CDN for media
- File upload handling
- REST vs GraphQL
- Rate limiting
- Authentication (JWT, OAuth2)
- MVC pattern
- Dependency injection
- Stateless vs Stateful services
- Consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft)
- Eventual consistency
- Vector clocks
- Deep dive into trade-offs in distributed systems
- Strong, eventual, causal consistency
- Conflict resolution
- B-Trees, LSM Trees
- Write-Ahead Logging (WAL)
- ACID & BASE properties
- Circuit Breaker
- Bulkhead
- Backpressure
- Service registry (Consul, Eureka)
- Config servers
- Twitter Feed Design
- YouTube Streaming Architecture
- WhatsApp Messaging System
- Uber/Google Maps (Geo-based Systems)
- Dropbox/Google Drive (File Syncing)
- Logging, Metrics, Tracing
- Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack
- TLS/SSL
- OWASP Top 10
- Data encryption (at rest and in transit)
- API Gateway and WAF
- Data locality
- Latency optimization
- CDN and Edge computing
- CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)
- Kubernetes architecture
- CRDTs
- Gossip protocols
- Quorum systems
- Tail latency
- Caching tiers
- Queue tuning
- Pre-computation strategies
- Bloom filters
- Memory-efficient algorithms
A complete learning path from traditional AI to modern Generative AI and intelligent autonomous Agent systems. Perfect for engineers, architects, or AI-curious developers.
- What is Artificial Intelligence?
- Types of AI: Narrow, General, Super
- Rule-Based Systems
- Search Algorithms (DFS, BFS, A*, Minimax)
- Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforcement Learning
- Classification vs Regression
- Model Training and Evaluation
- Overfitting vs Underfitting
- Linear Regression, Logistic Regression
- Decision Trees, Random Forest
- K-Means Clustering
- SVM, Naive Bayes
- Scikit-learn
- Pandas, NumPy
- Jupyter Notebooks
- MLflow (experiment tracking)
- Perceptron, MLP, Backpropagation
- Activation Functions (ReLU, Sigmoid, Softmax)
- Loss Functions (MSE, Cross-Entropy)
- CNN (Image Tasks)
- RNN, LSTM, GRU (Sequence Tasks)
- Autoencoders
- TensorFlow & Keras
- PyTorch
- ONNX
- Variational Autoencoders (VAE)
- GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks)
- Diffusion Models (Stable Diffusion, Imagen)
- What is an LLM?
- Transformers Architecture
- Pretraining vs Fine-tuning
- Prompt Engineering
- GPT (OpenAI)
- Claude (Anthropic)
- LLaMA (Meta)
- Gemini (Google)
- Mistral, Mixtral
- LangChain
- LlamaIndex
- Vector Databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant)
- PromptLayer, Weights & Biases (W&B)
- What is an AI Agent?
- Autonomy, Reasoning, Reactivity
- Planning vs Reactive Agents
- Perception → Memory → Planning → Action
- Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) Model
- LangGraph
- AutoGen (Microsoft)
- CrewAI
- AgentGPT / OpenAgents / MetaGPT
- BabyAGI, CAMEL, Voyager
- Short-Term vs Long-Term Memory
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Task Planning (ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, Toolformer)
- Tool Usage via APIs
- OpenAI API
- HuggingFace Inference API
- Google GenAI Studio (Gemini)
- Anthropic Claude API
- Document Parsing (PDF, DOCX, HTML)
- Embeddings (OpenAI, Cohere, SentenceTransformers)
- Vector Store Querying
- Building Chatbots with Context Window
- Agents with Tools and Memory
- Multimodal AI (Text, Image, Audio, Video)
- Prompt Injection
- Jailbreak Prevention
- Alignment & Guardrails
- Bias and Fairness
- FastAPI, Flask, Streamlit, Next.js
- Containerizing AI Apps (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Monitoring (Prompt Logging, Feedback Loops)
- Cost Optimization (token budgeting, caching)
A comprehensive guide to understanding, designing, and implementing scalable and resilient microservices architecture.
- What is a Microservice?
- Monolith vs Microservice Architecture
- Pros and Cons of Microservices
- Use Cases for Microservices
- Bounded Context & Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
- Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)
- Stateless Services
- API-first Design
- REST vs gRPC
- Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication
- JSON vs Protobuf
- API Gateway Basics
- Database per Service Pattern
- Shared Database Anti-pattern
- Data Ownership
- Eventual Consistency
- Request-Response
- Publish-Subscribe
- Event Sourcing
- Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
- Static vs Dynamic Service Discovery
- Client-side vs Server-side Discovery
- Tools: Consul, Eureka, etcd
- Authentication & Authorization
- Rate Limiting & Throttling
- Load Balancing
- OpenAPI (Swagger)
- OAuth2, JWT, API Keys
- Secure Service-to-Service Communication (mTLS)
- Zero Trust Architecture
- Message Brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS)
- Idempotency in Event Handling
- Dead Letter Queues (DLQs)
- Saga Pattern
- Circuit Breaker Pattern (Hystrix, Resilience4J)
- Retry & Backoff Strategies
- Bulkhead Pattern
- Timeout & Fallback Mechanisms
- Centralized Logging (ELK, Loki)
- Distributed Tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry)
- Metrics & Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Contract Testing (Pact)
- Integration Testing
- Chaos Testing (Gremlin, Litmus)
- Service Virtualization
- Docker for Microservices
- Kubernetes (K8s) Fundamentals
- Helm Charts
- Service Mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
- GitOps Principles
- Canary Deployments
- Blue-Green Deployments
- Feature Toggles
- Centralized Config (Spring Cloud Config, HashiCorp Vault)
- Environment-based Configuration
- Secret Rotation Policies
- Strangler Fig Pattern
- Backend for Frontend (BFF)
- Sidecar Pattern
- Ambassador Pattern
- Anti-Corruption Layer (ACL)
- Microservices and Serverless: Trade-offs
- Hybrid Architecture: Microservices + Monolith
- Cost Optimization Strategies
- Multi-Tenancy in Microservices
A structured roadmap covering the fundamentals to advanced concepts in DevOps, including tooling, automation, CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud-native practices.
- What is DevOps?
- DevOps vs Traditional IT
- DevOps Lifecycle
- Benefits of DevOps
- Agile & DevOps Relationship
- Git Basics (clone, commit, push, pull)
- Branching Strategies (Git Flow, Trunk-based Development)
- GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket
- What is CI?
- Setting Up CI Pipelines
- Unit Testing in CI
- Popular CI Tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI)
- Make, Maven, Gradle, npm, Yarn
- Dockerizing Applications
- CI vs CD vs CD
- Rolling Deployments
- Blue-Green Deployment
- Canary Releases
- Feature Flags
- Docker Basics
- Docker Compose
- Container Registries (Docker Hub, GitHub Packages, Harbor)
- Kubernetes Basics (Pods, Deployments, Services)
- Helm Charts
- Namespaces & RBAC
- K8s Ingress Controllers
- Secrets Management (Vault, SOPS, Sealed Secrets)
- Least Privilege Access
- CI/CD Secrets Injection
- Image Scanning (Trivy, Clair)
- Infrastructure Testing (Terratest, Kitchen)
- Smoke & Integration Testing in Pipelines
- Load Testing (k6, JMeter)
- Chaos Engineering (Gremlin, Litmus)
- Logs: ELK, Loki
- Metrics: Prometheus, Grafana
- Tracing: OpenTelemetry, Jaeger
- Alerting: Alertmanager, OpsGenie
- Terraform
- Pulumi
- Ansible
- CloudFormation
- Shift-left Security
- Static & Dynamic Code Analysis (SAST/DAST)
- Policy as Code (OPA, Kyverno)
- Supply Chain Security (Sigstore, Cosign)
- AWS (EC2, ECS, EKS, IAM, CloudWatch)
- GCP (GKE, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry)
- Azure (AKS, DevOps Pipelines)
- Lambda, Cloud Functions
- Serverless Framework
- CI/CD for Serverless
- GitOps Basics
- Argo CD, Flux
- Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)
- Backstage, Port
- Microservices in DevOps Context
- Release Strategies
- Configuration Management (Consul, Etcd)
- Cost Monitoring & Optimization
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Concepts