SysPad › Lessons

Learn cloud architecture, service by service

Short interactive lessons on the cloud services you design with: what each one does, where it becomes the bottleneck, and what it costs. Free, no account.

Each lesson is a short read with diagrams, flashcards and a quiz, and every service it covers is on the SysPad canvas, so you can place it in an architecture and simulate the traffic straight afterwards. The sections below follow the path a request takes through a system rather than the alphabet.

Diagram lessons

Start here. These cover how to model traffic arriving at a system, and how to stand in for anything the catalog does not name.

Networking lessons

How a request reaches your compute. Load balancers, API gateways, DNS and private connectivity, and which of them adds latency rather than capacity.

CDN and edge lessons

Serving from the edge instead of the origin. Cache hit ratios, origin shielding, and how much load a cache actually removes from what sits behind it.

Compute lessons

Servers and containers you size yourself. How instances, tasks and Kubernetes nodes turn CPU and memory into throughput, and where the ceiling sits.

Serverless lessons

Code that runs per request with nothing to size. Concurrency limits, cold starts, and the point where paying per invocation stops being the cheaper option.

Orchestration lessons

Coordinating work that outlives a single request. State machines, workflow engines and schedulers, and how retries change the load a downstream service sees.

Database lessons

Where state lives and what it costs to read. Relational, key-value, cache, search and graph stores, their consistency choices, and the connection and partition limits that saturate first.

Storage lessons

Objects, blocks and file systems. Durability, throughput ceilings and access patterns, and why the requests against storage usually cost more than the bytes.

Messaging lessons

Decoupling producers from consumers. Queues, topics, streams and delivery, and how a buffer turns a traffic spike into a backlog instead of an outage.

Analytics lessons

Querying data you already collected. Warehouses, query engines and scan-based pricing, and why a report is a different workload from a request.

AI and machine learning lessons

Model inference as a dependency. Hosted and self-managed models, token pricing, and the latency an inference call adds to a request path.

Security lessons

Controlling who reaches what. Authentication, secrets, keys and request filtering, and where each one sits in the path a request takes.

Monitoring lessons

Knowing what the system is doing. Metrics, logs and traces, what they cost at volume, and which of the three answers which question.

Payments lessons

Taking money inside a request flow. The third-party call, the latency it adds, and what happens to the order when it fails.

Open the SysPad canvas · Architecture examples