Krishna Chaitanya
I'm Krishna Chaitanya. I've spent 15 years as a Solutions Architect in healthcare and fintech. I built Free System Design because I wanted system design to feel less abstract.
Most system design material shows you the finished architecture: a load balancer here, a cache there, a message queue somewhere in the middle. But when I was building systems where an outage affects patients and payments, not just page loads, the useful questions were different: Why do we need this component? What problem does it solve? What happens when it fails? And when does the architecture need to change?
That's the idea behind Free System Design. Instead of treating architecture as a collection of static diagrams, the course lets you watch systems behave. You build components, connect them, put them under simulated traffic, create bottlenecks, and observe what happens when parts of the system fail or recover. It covers 46 concepts across 8 phases, starting with the journey of a single web request and moving toward complete distributed architectures and system design interview problems.
I teach it the same way: less memorization, more reasoning about trade-offs and failure.
Alongside the course, I publish short technical explainers and articles about backend infrastructure and distributed systems, which have been viewed more than 15 million times.
What Free System Design is about
The goal is not to memorize the architecture of Netflix, Uber or YouTube. It's to understand the engineering decisions that lead to those architectures:
- Why does a system need caching?
- When does one database stop being enough?
- Why introduce asynchronous messaging?
- What happens when traffic suddenly increases?
- Where are the single points of failure?
- What trade-offs appear as the system grows?
Once you can answer those, system design becomes much easier to reason about.
Where to start
- Anatomy of a Web Request, what actually happens between pressing Enter and seeing the page
- Cache, why a system needs one and what it costs you
- Load Balancer, the first component you add when one server stops being enough
- How to Crack a System Design Interview, the framework for answering an open-ended design question
- Design a URL Shortener, a full interview problem worked end to end
Find me online
- Instagram @krishnachaytanyaa
- YouTube @krishnachaytanyaa
- TikTok @krishnachaytanya
- X @krishnachaytany
- Medium @krishnachaytanya
Contact
Questions, collaborations, or lesson ideas: [email protected]