Grokking System Design – Foundation Track is the first step in mastering the craft of designing scalable and reliable software systems. It focuses on core architectural principles, trade-off reasoning, and practical implementation — giving you both the mental scaffolding to think like a systems engineer AND the hands-on skills to build production-ready systems.

What makes this guide unique is its dual approach: you'll learn foundational concepts (Why use caching? When to scale horizontally?) alongside practical tool implementation (How do I configure Redis Cluster? How do I set up Kafka topics?). This bridges the gap that most engineers face — understanding architectural theory but struggling to implement it with real tools.

While advanced system design involves balancing consistency models or replication factors across distributed systems, the Foundation Track teaches why these problems exist in the first place — through intuitive examples, scenario-driven reasoning, and hands-on tool configuration.

This guide is your architectural sandbox: experiment, learn, reason, implement, and most importantly, build the habit of thinking and building in systems.

Grokking System Design – Advanced Track is the next evolution in mastering the craft of designing planet-scale distributed systems. It focuses on advanced architectural patterns, distributed systems trade-offs, and sophisticated implementation — giving you both the expert-level reasoning to think like a systems architect AND the production skills to build systems that serve millions with five-nines reliability.

What makes this guide unique is its dual approach: you'll learn advanced concepts (Why use event sourcing? When to apply saga patterns vs. two-phase commit?) alongside production implementation (How do I implement saga orchestration with Temporal? How do I deploy service mesh with Istio?). This bridges the gap that senior engineers face — understanding distributed systems theory but struggling to implement advanced patterns in production.

While foundational system design teaches why caching and horizontal scaling matter, the Advanced Track tackles how to handle distributed transactions across regions, implement CQRS with event sourcing, orchestrate complex workflows with compensation logic, and make systems observable at planetary scale — through real-world scenarios, sophisticated trade-off analysis, and hands-on advanced tool implementation.

This guide is your architectural proving ground: design at scale, implement advanced patterns, reason about consistency, deploy sophisticated systems, and most importantly, build the expertise of architecting and operating distributed systems in production.