🔥 17 Best Free GitHub Repositories to Crack System Design Interviews 🛠️

📜 TL;DR ✂️

Ever imagined how big tech companies build and scale large-scale products? What skills do their engineers possess? How do they decide which framework to choose for a product, or how do they handle millions of terabytes of data?

The only answer to all these questions is System Design. Yes, you heard it right! System Design is the core skill required to design, manage, and build large-scale, scalable products. It involves defining the architecture, components, interfaces, modules, and data for a system to meet specific requirements.

There are no specific prerequisites for this article. Anyone, from senior developers to those who have just started their coding journey, can benefit from these resources. For beginners, the only expectation is that you have a basic understanding of computers and programming.

In this article, I will share the 17 best free Github repositories to learn and master system design. These resources will help you ace your technical interviews or apply the concepts to build and scale your own products.

Please make sure to give a star to these repositories as it's free to start them!

GitHub Repositories

GitHub is a code hosting platform where people can share, version, manage, test, and deploy their code. This wonderful platform uses Git versioning systems, which allow developers to maintain and version their code in a tree-like structure. However, many people think that GitHub is just a code hosting platform, unaware that it is also a hidden treasure trove of free and open-source knowledge. In this article, I will share the best free GitHub repositories to learn and master system design for free.

1. System Design Primer

• The System Design Primer is a free and open-source GitHub repository designed to help you learn and practice all the key concepts of system design at no cost.
• In this repository you will find topics like Performance vs scalability, Latency vs throughput, Availability vs consistency, CAP theorem, CP - consistency and partition tolerance, AP - availability and partition tolerance, Consistency patterns, Weak consistency, Eventual consistency, Strong consistency, Availability patterns, Fail-over, Replication, Availability in numbers, Domain name system, Content delivery network, Push CDNs, Pull CDNs, Load balancer, Active-passive, Active-active, Layer 4 load balancing, Layer 7 load balancing, Horizontal scaling, Reverse proxy (web server), Load balancer vs reverse proxy, Application layer, Microservices, Service discovery, Database, Relational database management system (RDBMS), Master-slave replication, Master-master replication, Federation, Sharding, Denormalization, SQL tuning, NoSQL, Key-value store, Document store, Wide column store, Graph Database, SQL or NoSQL, Cache, Client caching, CDN caching, Web server caching, Database caching, Application caching, Caching at the database query level, Caching at the object level, When to update the cache, Cache-aside, Write-through, Write-behind (write-back), Refresh-ahead, Asynchronism, Message queues, Task queues, Back pressure, Communication, Transmission control protocol (TCP), User datagram protocol (UDP), Remote procedure call (RPC), Representational state transfer (REST) & Security.
• The repository has received 227k stars and has been forked over 47k times on GitHub.
• It currently has 118+ contributors and is available in 10+ languages, including English, Japanese, French, German, and Bengali.
• It is ideal for everyone from junior developers to software architects and CTOs.

Give this repository a ⭐

2.System Design Roadmap by Developer Roadmap

• The Developer Roadmap is a free and open-source GitHub repository designed to help you learn and practice system design through a structured roadmap.
• It also includes roadmaps for learning React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, and many other programming languages and frameworks.
• The repository has 298k stars and has been forked over 39.2k times on GitHub.
• It currently has 1,160 contributors and is available only in English.
• It is ideal for everyone from junior developers to software architects and CTOs.

Give this repository a ⭐

3. System Design 1o1 by Byte Byte Go

• The System Design 101 from Byte Byte Go is a free and open-source GitHub repository designed to help you learn and practice system design from scratch. Although this repository includes a portion of their paid System Design course, it can be considered a goldmine for beginner developers or junior software engineers. You can find important and beginner-friendly system design concepts such as software communication protocols, APIs, CI/CD, databases, software architecture patterns, and much more.
• The repository has 64.6k stars and has been forked over 6.8k times on GitHub.
• It currently has 15 contributors and is available only in English.
• It is ideal for junior software engineers and newbie software developers.

Give this repository a ⭐

4. System Design Resources by Interview Ready

• The System Design Resources from InterviewReady is a free and open-source GitHub repository designed to help you learn and practice system design from scratch. Although this repository includes a portion of InterviewReady’s paid and comprehensive System Design course, it can still be considered a valuable resource for beginner developers or junior software engineers.
• In this repository, you will find important topics such as Video Processing, Cluster and Workflow Management, Intra-Service Messaging, Message Queue Antipattern, Service Mesh, Practical System Design, Distributed File Systems, Time Series Databases, Rate Limiting, In-Memory Databases (e.g., Redis), Network Protocols, Chess Engine Design, Subscription Management Systems, Google Docs, API Design, NoSQL Database Internals, NoSQL Database Algorithms, Database Replication, Containers and Docker, Capacity Estimation, Publisher-Subscriber Architecture, Event-Driven Architectures, Software Architectures, Microservices, Distributed Transaction Consistency Patterns, Load Balancing, Alerts and Anomaly Detection, Distributed Logging, Metrics and Text Search Engines, Single Point of Failure, Location-Based Services, Batch Processing, Real-Time Stream Processing, Caching, Distributed Consensus, Authorization, Content Delivery Networks, Testing Distributed Systems, and other system design resources.
• The repository has 16k stars and has been forked over 2k times on GitHub. It currently has 12 contributors, is maintained by the InterviewReady team, and is available only in English.
• It is ideal for newbie to mid-level software developers.

Give this repository a ⭐

5. Awesome Low Level Design by Ashish Pratap Singh

• The Awesome Low-Level Design repository by Asish Pratap Singh( Previously Software engineer at Amazon, Adobe and Morgan Stanely.)is a free and open-source GitHub repository designed to help you learn and practice low-level design topics from scratch. This repository can be considered one of the most valuable resources for learning and mastering low-level design concepts for free, catering to everyone from newbie to professional developers and software architects.
• This repository covers fundamental to advanced topics, including OOP (Object-Oriented Programming), important SDLC principles like SOLID, DRY, YAGNI, and KISS, Software Design Patterns such as Creational Patterns, Structural Patterns, and Behavioral Patterns, UML diagrams, and Low-Level Design interview questions, such as Parking Lot Design, Vending Machine Design, Publisher-Subscriber Design, and many more.
• The repository has 8.2k stars and has been forked over 2.3k times on GitHub. It currently has 21 contributors, is maintained by the Asish Pratap Singh, and is available only in English.
• It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

Give this repository a ⭐

6. System Design by Karanpratap Singh

• System Design by Karan Pratap Singh is a free and open-source Github repository to learn and master Beginner friendly to advanced level System Design concepts for free. Karan is currently working as a cloud engineer at Apple and oftenly shares tutorials on topics like System Design and Software Development.

• In this repository you will find topics like IP, OSI Model, TCP and UDP, Domain Name System (DNS), Load Balancing, Clustering, Caching, Content Delivery Network (CDN), Proxy, Availability, Scalability, Storage,Databases and DBMS, SQL databases, NoSQL databases, SQL vs NoSQL databases, Database Replication, Indexes, Normalization and Denormalization, ACID and BASE consistency models, CAP theorem, PACELC Theorem, Transactions, Distributed Transactions, Sharding, Consistent Hashing, Database Federation,N-tier architecture, Message Brokers, Message Queues, Publish-Subscribe, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Monoliths and Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), Event Sourcing, Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), API Gateway, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, Long polling, WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE),Geohashing and Quadtrees, Circuit breaker, Rate Limiting, Service Discovery, SLA, SLO, SLI, Disaster recovery, Virtual Machines (VMs) and Containers, OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC), Single Sign-On (SSO), SSL, TLS, mTLS.

• The repository has 33k stars and has been forked over 3.6k times on GitHub.

• It currently has 10 contributors, is maintained by*Karan Pratap Singh*, and is available only in English.

• It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

  Give this repository a ⭐

7. Low Level Design Primer

• Low Level Design Primer is a free and open-source Github repository to brush up advanced Low Level System Design concepts for free. It is built and maintained by Prasad Gujar who is currently working as a Software engineer at Tala Payments team
• In this repository you will find topics like System Design Book Recommendations, links to free , popular and authentic Youtube Channels for mastering System Design, System Design Interview questions and their solutions like Design an online hotel booking system, Design a Logistics System, Design Tic Tac Toe, Design a configuration management system, Design a Vending Machine, Design Maps Navigator Client for different transportation types (OOD), Design a Json Parser from scratch, Design Elevator, CricInfo/Cricbuzz,etc
• The repository has 6.5k stars and has been forked over 2.3k times on GitHub.
• It currently has 7 contributors, is maintained by Prasad Gujar, and is available only in English.

• It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

  Give this repository a ⭐

8. Low Level Design By Interview Ready

• Low Level Design is a free and open-source Github repository to brush up from beginner to advanced Low Level System Design concepts for free. It is built and maintained by Interview Ready team which is one of the leading platforms for learning and mastermind System Design Interviews
• In this repository you will find beginner level low level System Design topics like Cache, Event Bus, Rate Limiter, Service Orchestrator, Design Patterns, etc
• The repository has 704 stars and has been forked over 163 times on GitHub.
• It currently has no visible team, is maintained by the Interview Ready team , and is available only in English.
• It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

Give this repository a ⭐

9. System Design Interview

• System Design Interview is a free and open-source Github repository to level up beginner to advancedLevel System Design Interview questions for free.
• In this repository you will find beginner level low level System Design topics like Object Oriented Design,System Design interview tips, Product roadmaps, Design Patterns, etc
• The repository has 21.8k stars and has been forked over 5.1k times on GitHub.
• It currently has 23 contributors , and is available only in English.

• It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

  Give this repository a ⭐

10. System Design By Shashank Khare

• System Design By ShashanK Khare is a free and open-source Github repository to level up beginner to advancedLevel System Design Interview questions for free. It is build and maintained by ShashanK Khare who is one of the brilliant software engineers currently working for mangroup UK.
  • In this repository you will find beginner level low level System Design topics like Cache, Event Bus, Rate Limiter, Service Orchestrator, Design Patterns, etc
  • The repository has 21.8k stars and has been forked over 5.1k times on GitHub.
  • It currently has 23 contributors , and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

Give this repository a ⭐

11. Awesome System Design Resources

• System Design By Ashish Pratap Singh is a free and open-source Github repository to level up beginner to advancedLevel System Design Interview & questions for free. It is built and maintained by Ashish Pratap Singh who is one of the most talented software engineers and previously worked at Amazon as a senior software engineer.

  • In this repository you will find System Design Key Concepts topics like*, Scalability, Availability, CAP Theorem, ACID Transactions, Consistent Hashing, Rate Limiting, SPOF, Fault Tolerance, Consensus Algorithms, Gossip Protocol, Service Discovery, API Design, Disaster Recovery, Distributed Tracing, 🛠️ System Design Building Blocks like , Content Delivery Network (CDN), Proxy vs Reverse Proxy, Domain Name System (DNS), Caching, Caching Strategies, Distributed Caching, Load Balancing, Databases Types, SQL vs NoSQL, Database Indexes, Consistency Patterns, HeartBeats, Circuit Breaker, Idempotency, Database Scaling, Data Replication, Data Redundancy, Database Sharding, Database Architectures, Failover, Bloom Filters, Message Queues, WebSockets, Checksums, API Gateway, Microservices Guidelines, Distributed Locking, ⚖️ System Design Tradeoffs like , Top 15 Tradeoffs, Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling, Stateful vs Stateless Design, Batch vs Stream Processing, Strong vs Eventual Consistency, Read-Through vs Write-Through Cache, Push vs Pull Architecture, Long-polling vs WebSockets, REST vs RPC, Synchronous vs asynchronous communications, Latency vs Throughput, 🖇️ System Design Architectural Patterns like, Client-Server Architecture, Microservices Architecture, Serverless Architecture, Event-Driven Architecture, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Architecture and many more*
  • The repository has 18.7k stars and has been forked over 4.5k times on GitHub.
  • It currently has 2 contributors , and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

Give this repository a ⭐

12. Grokking System Design By Jeevan Kumar Raj

• Grokking System Design By Jeevan Kumar Raj is a free and open source repository to power up beginner to advancedLevel System Design skills for free. It is built and maintained by Jeevan Kumar Raj who is an experienced HR manager with 14 years of experience

  • In this repository you will find topics on Distributed System Design Basics like Key Characteristics, Load balancing, Caching, Sharding, Indexes, Proxies, Queues, Redundancy, SQL vs. NoSQL, CAP Theorem, Consistent Hashing, Client-Server Communication, System Designs, System Design examples like Short URL Service, Pastebin, Instagram, Dropbox, Twitter, YouTube, Twitter Search, Web Crawler, Facebook Newsfeed and many more.
  • The repository has 5.3k stars and has been forked over 1.5k times on GitHub.
  • It is currently maintained by Jeevan and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.

  Give this repository a ⭐

13. System Design questions by Arpit Bhayani

• System Design questions by Arpit Bhayani is a free and open source repository to boot up advanced level System Designs for free. It is built and maintained by Arpit Bhayani who is one of the most talented software architects in the industry having experience working in top notch companies like Google and Amazon and is the creator of Dice Db (a redis-compliant, reactive, scalable, highly-available, unified cache optimized for modern hardware.)
  • In this repository you will find popular System Design interview questions like designing Design a Blogging Platform, Design Online Offline Indicator, Design Airline Check-in, Design SQL-backed KV Store, Design Slack's Real Time Communication - NEW, Design a Load Balancer, Design Synchronized Queue Consumers, Design an Image Service, Design a HashTag Service, Design OnePic, Design Photo Tagging, Design User Affinity, Design Newly Unread Message Indicator, Design a Distributed Cache, Design a Word Dictionary, Design a Superfast KV Store, Design S3, Design a Faster Superfast KV Store, Design a Video Processing Pipeline for Streaming Service, Design a Text-based Search Engine and many more.
  • The repository has 2.1k stars and has been forked over 445 times on GitHub.
  • It is currently maintained by Arpit and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software developers.
  • Arpit also provides masterclass System Design Topics so make sure to check out that too

Give this repository a ⭐

14. System Design and Architecture By Tian Pan

• System Design and Architecture by Tian Pan is a free and open source repository to skill up beginner to advanced level System Designs Topics for free. It is built and maintained by Tain Pan who is one of the most brilliant and high-performing software engineers and engineering manager working in the San Francisco Bay Area for 10 years, previously working at Uber, Oracle, IoTeX, and Microsoft. If you are preparing for your FAANG interviews then this repository is a gold mine for you

  • In this repository you will find the most popular and real world System Design interview questions like designing Instagram or Pinterest, Designing Uber, How Facebook Scale its Social Graph Store? TAO, How Netflix Serves Viewing Data?, How to design robust and predictable APIs with idempotency?, How to stream video over HTTP for mobile devices? HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Designing a distributed logging system, Designing a URL shortener, Designing a KV store with external storage, Designing a distributed in-memory KV store or Memcached, Designing Facebook photo storage, Designing Stock Exchange, Designing Smart Notification of Stock Price Changes, Designing Square Cash or PayPal Money Transfer System, Designing payment webhook, Designing a metric system, Designing a recommendation system, Designing Airbnb or a hotel booking system, Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform -- Symphony, Designing typeahead search or autocomplete, Designing a Load Balancer or Dropbox Bandaid, Fraud Detection with Semi-supervised Learning, and System Design theoretical topics like Introduction to Architecture, How to scale a web service?, ACID vs BASE, Data Partition and Routing, Replica, Consistency, and CAP theorem, Load Balancer Types, Concurrency Model, Improving availability with failover, Bloom Filter, Skiplist, B tree vs. B+ tree, Intro to Relational Database, 4 Kinds of No-SQL, Key value cache, Stream and Batch Processing Frameworks, Cloud Design Patterns, Public API Choices, Lambda Architecture, iOS Architecture Patterns Revisited, What can we communicate in soft skills interview?, Experience Deep Dive, 3 Programming Paradigms, SOLID Design Principles
  • The repository has 2.6k stars and has been forked over 587 times on GitHub.
  • It is primarily maintained by Tina and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software architects.

  • Tian also writes blogs on popular System Design and engineering topics so make sure to check out that here

    Give this repository a ⭐

15. Complete System Design by Coder World

• Complete System Design By Coder World is a free and open source repository to learn and master beginner to advanced level System Designs Topics for free. It is built and maintained by Naina Chaturvedi who is a Senior Software Engineer with past working experience in Goldman Sachs.

  • In this repository you will find the most popular and real world System Design case studies like Complete Cheat Sheet for Tech Interviews - How to prepare efficiently, Mega Launch - 200+ System Design Case Studies, System Design Most Important Terms, System Design Template, Complete System Design Case Studies, How to solve any System Design Question (approach that you should take), ML System Design Case Studies Series, All tech system design case studies pulse -, How Lyft Handles 2x Traffic Spikes during Peak Hours with Auto scaling Infrastructure, Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Marvel: How it Serves 2.9 Billion Daily Active Users Using PyTorch and Cassandra, 8+ Billion Daily Views: How Facebook's Live Video Ranking Algorithm Processes Daily Views Using Storm and Memcache, 500+ Million Users Daily: The Tech Behind Instagram Stories, At Amazon How 310 Million Users Experience Lightning-Fast Load Times, How PayPal Manages Over 400 Million Active Accounts Seamlessly?, The Billion-Dollar Question - What's My ETA? How Uber Calculates ETA -, What happens Once You Press Play button on Netflix, How Netflix handles millions of memberships efficiently?, Impressive Tech Behind YouTube's Scaling to 3 Billion Users: Inside Vitess Database Clustering, How Microservices Work?, How Distributed Message Queues Work?, How to Efficiently Build Scalable Machine Learning Pipelines, FAANG level - How to Write Production Ready Code? and many more System Design topics.
  • The repository has 4k stars and has been forked over 522 times on GitHub.
  • It is primarily maintained by Naina and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software architects.
  • Niana also runs a Youtube channel sharing System Design and other Tech interview specific topics which you can check out here.

  Give this repository a ⭐

16. System Design By Coders Guild

• System Design By Coders Guild is a free and open source Github repository to practice System Design Topics and interview questions for free. It is built by Sumit Lahiri who is a talented senior full stack developer currently pursuing PHD in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur. Sumit also has previous experience of working as a software engineer at TCS and Golem Factory.
  • In this repository you will find topics like MapReduce: Simplied Data Processing on Large Clusters, Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, The Google File System, The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems, Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store, Frontend in React, State Management using Redux, Angular Get Started, First DJango App, Build a CRUD Todo app with Django and React/Redux, The MERN Stack Tutorial – Building A React CRUD Application From Start To Finish, Introduction to Memcached, Cassandra Introduction Features, Introduction to HBase, Introduction to MongoDB, Introduction to Redis, Storm, Introduction to Zookeeper, Kafka, YouTube Architecture, Scaling Pinterest, Google Architecture, Scaling Twitter, The WhatsApp Architecture, Flickr Architecture, Amazon Architecture, Stack Overflow Architecture, Pinterest Architecture, Tumblr Architecture, Instagram Architecture, TripAdvisor Architecture, Scaling Mailbox, Salesforce Architecture, ESPN Architecture, Uber Architecture, DropBox Design, Splunk Architecture, Good Parts of AWS, Azure DataCenter Architecture, Evolution Of Search Engines Architecture - Highscalability, Trending and most asked System Design problems like Design a CDN network,Design a random ID generation system,Design a key-value database,Design the Facebook news feed function,Design the Facebook timeline function,Design a function to return the top k requests during past time interval,Design an online multiplayer card game,Design a picture sharing system and many more
  • The repository has 2k stars and has been forked over 374 times on GitHub.
  • It is primarily maintained by Sumit and is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie to professional software architects.

Give this repository a ⭐

17. Mobile System Design Interviews

• System-design-interviews is a free and open source GitHub repository to practice and master practical System Design Skills for free

  • In this repository you will find important System Design topics like High-Level Diagram, Server-side component like Backend,Push Provider,CDN (Content Delivery Network), client-side components like API Service, Persistence,Repository,Tweet Feed Flow,DI Graph, Image Loader, Signals,App Module , Graphql and many more mobile engineering topics
  • The repository has 2.1k stars and has been forked over 670 times on GitHub.
  • It is available only in English.
  • It is ideal for newbie professional mobile focused software engineers .

  Give this repository a ⭐

Conclusion

So far in this article, we have discussed 17 free GitHub repositories that will help you excel in your System Design interviews. Ensure you have a strong foundation in Computer Science fundamentals. If not, start again from the basics and take your time, as some System Design concepts can be complex and require patience to learn and master.

I recommend dedicating at least six months to your preparation. Create a routine and follow a structured roadmap. If you have questions, post them on public platforms like Stack Overflow or Reddit communities, or use ChatGPT for assistance.

Finally, make sure to follow my blog if you’re interested in reading more articles like this!