AI ENGINEER FOUNDATIONS · STAGE 07
Production system design
Connect APIs, infrastructure, and operational trade-offs.
Practice designing systems as a set of explicit requirements and request flows. Consider API boundaries, storage, caching, limits, scalability, reliability, and observability.
BEFORE YOU START
Prerequisites
- Programming and data foundations
- Basic networking and databases
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
What you should be able to do
- Clarify functional and non-functional requirements
- Trace requests through a design
- Explain scale, failure, and security trade-offs
WHAT YOU'LL COVER
Key concepts
SEE THE CONNECTIONS
A visual learning sequence
These are connected learning steps, not the only valid order. Revisit earlier ideas when an exercise reveals a gap.
Suggested learning sequence
Clarify the problem
Define users, behavior, scale assumptions, and reliability expectations.
Why it matters: Design choices only make sense relative to constraints.
Draw the core flow
Show APIs, state, storage, caches, and dependencies.
Why it matters: A request path reveals bottlenecks and failure boundaries.
Test trade-offs
Consider load, failure, security, and observability.
Why it matters: A good design explains what happens outside the happy path.
Put it into practice
Design a short-link service by separating code creation from redirect traffic, then discuss uniqueness, cache expiry, and abuse controls.
Practice tasks
- Draw the redirect path for a URL shortener.
- Add rate limiting to an API request flow.
- Identify two failure modes and a recovery strategy.
How you'll know you're ready
- Can state assumptions before choosing architecture.
- Can explain trade-offs and operational behavior, not just component names.