as a Senior Engineer with over 12 years of experience, I can tell you quite
certainly that if you're still getting rejections in system design interviews after
good efforts, I think your fundamentals are not strong...
Dedicate 4-8 weeks to mastering these design fundamentals, then practice
designing few systems(instead of mock interviews).
Scaling & Architecture
↬ CDN
↬ Caching
↬ Sharding
↬ Queueing
↬ Replication
↬ Partitioning
↬ API Gateway
↬ Rate Limiting
↬ CAP Theorem
↬ Microservices
↬ Load Balancing
↬ Fault Tolerance
↬ Database Scaling
↬ Service Discovery
↬ Consistency Models
↬ Eventual Consistency
↬ Distributed Transactions
↬ Monolith vs Microservices
↬ Leader Election
Databases & Storage
↬ Leader-Follower Replication
↬ WAL (Write Ahead Log)
↬ Asynchronous Processing
↬ Transaction Isolation
↬ Read/Write Patterns
↬ Consistent Hashing
↬ Redis/Memcached
↬ Backup & Restore
↬ Hot/Cold Storage
↬ Data Partitioning
↬ Object Storage
↬ SQL vs NoSQL
↬ Data Retention
↬ Data Modeling
↬ OLAP vs OLTP
↬ ACID & BASE
↬ Bloom Filters
↬ File Systems
↬ S3 Basics
↬ B+ Trees
↬ Indexing
Communication & APIs
↬ JWT
↬ CORS
↬ OAuth
↬ Throttling
↬ Serialization
↬ API Security
↬ Long Polling
↬ WebSockets
↬ API Gateway
↬ Idempotency
↬ Service Mesh
↬ Retry Patterns
↬ REST vs gRPC
↬ API Versioning
↬ Circuit Breaker
↬ API Rate Limits
↬ Fan-out/Fan-in
↬ Protocol Buffers
↬ Message Queues
↬ Dead Letter Queue
Reliability & Observability
↬ Metrics
↬ Alerting
↬ Failover
↬ Logging
↬ Rollbacks
↬ Monitoring
↬ Heartbeats
↬ Retry Logic
↬ Autoscaling
↬ SLO/SLI/SLA
↬ Load Testing
↬ Error Budgets
↬ Health Checks
↬ Circuit Breaker
↬ Incident Response
↬ Chaos Engineering
↬ Distributed Tracing
↬ Canary Deployments
↬ Graceful Degradation
↬ Blue-Green Deployment