Distributed Systems in a Day
40,000 fans, 5,000 seats, one drop at ten o'clock. Follow it from one server to a hundred times the load: why every piece exists, and how it breaks.
Free preview01 Why distributed? The single machine ceiling
- Lessons
- 25
- Modules
- 6
- Running time
- 5 hours
- Before you start
- Comfortable reading code
- Free to watch
- 6 lessons
- Last updated
- Oct 3, 2026
Part of
- Backend engineer trackStep 12 of 12
- System design interview trackStep 2 of 9
[01] Access
[02] Who it's for
- Backend engineers whose service has outgrown one machine, or soon will.
- Anyone curious how real systems stay up and correct when machines and networks fail.
- No math or CS degree is needed, and there are no formal proofs.
[03] What you'll learn
- 01Design systems that survive node failures, network partitions, and clock skew
- 02Reason about consistency, availability, and partition tolerance from first principles
- 03Implement the protocols real clusters run on: Raft, gossip, leader election
- 04Build intuition for why every real distributed system trades correctness for latency somewhere
- 05Read papers (Dynamo, Spanner, Kafka) the way the authors meant them to be read
[04] Syllabus
Communication
6 lessons72 min- 0111m
- 0214m
- 0313m
- 0411m
- 0512m
- 0611m
Module quiz
5 questions, about 5 minutes
Coordination
5 lessons57 min- 07
System models: what can you assume? (locked)
11m - 08
Clocks and ordering (locked)
12m - 09
Leader election (locked)
11m - 10
Replication: when is a write safe? (locked)
11m - 11
Consistency and consensus (locked)
12m Module quiz
5 questions, about 5 minutes
Coordination avoidance
4 lessons52 min- 1212m
- 13
CRDTs: carts that merge themselves (locked)
13m - 1413m
- 1514m
Module quiz
5 questions, about 5 minutes
Scalability
5 lessons61 min- 1614m
- 1712m
- 1812m
- 1912m
- 2011m
Module quiz
5 questions, about 5 minutes
Resiliency
3 lessons37 min- 21
How things break: the 10:04 cascade (locked)
12m - 2213m
- 2312m
Module quiz
5 questions, about 5 minutes
Operations
2 lessons22 min- 2413m
- 259m
Module quiz
5 questions, about 5 minutes
Certificate
Finish every lesson and pass every module quiz
[05] Read first
Distributed Systems Is the System Design Course, Taught Properly
Every system design interview question is a distributed systems question in disguise. What the interview actually tests, why most system design courses skip it, and a lesson-by-lesson map from first principles to the whiteboard.
[06] Questions
- Do I need a math or CS background?
- No. Comfort with code and a willingness to think carefully about failure modes is enough. There's no probability theory and there are no formal proofs in this course.
- What if I can't afford a plan?
- Email mail@karnstack.com from a student address (.edu, .ac.in, or equivalent) and we'll work something out.
- Is there a refund?
- Yes. 7 days, no questions, mail@karnstack.com.
- Do you cover specific systems like Kafka or Cassandra?
- We walk through their key papers and design decisions, but the focus is the underlying principles. Once you understand consensus and replication, you can read any new system's docs and recognise what it's trading off.
[07] How it's made
The curriculum is curated by karnstack and reviewed by senior engineers in the industry before it ships. Narration is an AI voice (ElevenLabs) reading human-written, human-reviewed scripts. Read how courses are made.