Curriculum

The Core Curriculum

Follow the structured path from foundational systems design to resilient distributed operations.

Systems Foundation & Topology

Duration: 4h

Establish the critical bedrock of system design with boundaries, service topology, and platform trade-offs.

Theoretical Part
  • Cover monolith-to-microservice patterns and domain boundaries.
  • Understand failure domains, latency considerations, and topology trade-offs.
  • See how architecture decisions shape overall reliability.
Practical Part
  • Map an example platform into services.
  • Identify critical dependencies and ownership boundaries.
  • Draft a topology that supports recovery and operational clarity.

Data Architecture & Resilience

Duration: 4h

Design storage and data flows with resilience in mind, from consistency trade-offs to failover strategy.

Theoretical Part
  • Introduce CAP trade-offs and replication models.
  • Review recovery patterns and resilience expectations for data systems.
  • Frame how storage choices affect reliability engineering decisions.
Practical Part
  • Evaluate storage options for a sample workload.
  • Define backup and restore expectations.
  • Outline regional failover behavior for the system.

Event-Driven Logistics

Duration: 4h

Use asynchronous patterns to decouple systems and improve reliability under bursty or distributed workloads.

Theoretical Part
  • Explain brokers, queues, ordering, and idempotency.
  • Review retries, dead-lettering, and consumer recovery patterns.
  • Understand where asynchronous systems improve operational resilience.
Practical Part
  • Model a small event flow across services.
  • Define retry and dead-letter handling.
  • Identify the boundaries where async design reduces risk and toil.

Security & Synthesis

Duration: 3h

Bring the architecture together with final reliability checks, resilience reviews, and zero-trust thinking.

Theoretical Part
  • Review security boundaries and access patterns.
  • Connect operational controls with resilience outcomes.
  • See how reliability and security decisions reinforce each other.
Practical Part
  • Run a lightweight architecture review.
  • Identify the biggest gaps in the proposed system.
  • Turn the curriculum output into a clear implementation backlog.