System Design Academy

System Design Academy is a browser-based course platform for engineers preparing for system design interviews or moving into architecture work. It covers 766 lessons across fundamentals, caching, databases, replication, messaging, microservices, cloud, Kubernetes, security, observability, distributed systems and consistency models, and finishes with 20 capstone walkthroughs of real systems such as a URL shortener, a rate limiter, a chat system and a CDN.

The lessons are not video. Each one is a sequence of slides where architecture diagrams build up step by step as the explanation goes, alongside whiteboard scenes, live code editors you can run in the page, and a quiz you have to pass to mark the lesson complete. Progress, streaks and levels are tracked as you go.

A separate AI Engineering course covers model serving, packaging, training pipelines, retrieval and RAG, agents in production, evaluation and security across 71 lessons.

Pricing is one-time rather than a subscription. System Design is Rs499 in India or $7.99 globally, AI Engineering is Rs999 or $20, both with lifetime access including future lessons. Twenty lessons are free to read.