System Design on AWS
Building and Scaling Enterprise Solutions
The ultimate guide to designing, implementing, understanding, building, and scaling complex systems on AWS. Go from "Minimum Viable Product" to "Most Valuable Product". This is the book we wish we had when we were figuring things out.
Through detailed chapters, this book demystifies AWS's wide-ranging services and how they can be strategically leveraged to address both technical and business requirements.
Who Should Read This Book?
- Software architects, developers, DevOps engineers, and system architects who want to build or scale applications on AWS.
- Professionals transitioning from on-premises to cloud infrastructure or aiming to leverage AWS for large-scale applications.
- Founders seeking technical leverage.
- Engineers aiming for senior/staff-level interviews.
- Anyone building on AWS who wants to actually understand how the pieces fit together.
- People holding leadership positions in software development and DevOps, helping you remove team blockers and make informed decisions.
- Anyone who loves to build systems on any cloud platform or on-premises, or is just curious about building systems (the design principles are cloud-agnostic).
What This Book Isn't:
This book does not provide detailed code implementations for deploying infrastructure or application business logic. Instead, it emphasizes the architecture and design process, helping you understand how to break a system down into manageable components and make informed architectural decisions.🛠️ What's Inside? (600+ Pages of Pure Value)
📚 In summary, the book covers:
- Foundational system design principles (databases, queues, retries, sharding, caching, containerization, etc.)
- Deep dives into 30+ AWS services — not just theory, but how they work together
- Real-world architectures: messaging application, stock brokers, game leaderboards, social media platform, hotel reservation system and more
📖 Foreword
Systems design is one of the most important aspects of building apps that are scalable, available, performant, and secure, even when your usage increases by an order of magnitude or two. That's why I found the topic of this book to be so important. I like that this book starts with covering the basics of trade-offs in distributed systems, such as the CAP theorem, units of blast radius, and other common trade-offs in systems design, and then moves to how to apply these principles in practice.
I found this approach—going from core principles to actually putting them into practice on critical design decisions (such as "What is the best database for running my workload?" and "What's the best caching strategy for my workloads?" and "Which storage service should I choose?")—to be especially helpful as it teaches people how to think about these problems even as new capabilities from AWS emerge, making the concepts in this book more durable.
Personally, reading this book reminded me so much of the early days of AWS, when we spent a lot of time discussing these trade-offs. At that time, concepts like CAP theorem, blast radius, and seamless scalability were not well understood, and we had robust discussions around these topics and the inherent trade-offs they come with. However, those discussions led to some incredibly robust AWS services, such as S3, DynamoDB, and many others that millions of AWS customers love. I hope the you grasp these concepts and are inspired to build similarly amazing products and services that delight their customers.
Congratulations to the authors for writing such an excellent book, and best of luck to all who embark on this journey!
💼 Read by Professionals At
💬 What Experts Say
"Just received my copy of Mandeep's book -- System Design on AWS 🚀🔥
I went through the content and it has some amazing reads on not just AWS services but how to actually implement various designs practically!!
One particular thing I am looking forward to is Networking strategies -- always a big myth for me 😂
It also has 8 practical system designs, from building a Video Processing Pipeline to an Online Stock Trading Application!! 🚀
Gonna read this coming weekend! Will post the review as I go along!🔥 Thanks Mandeep Singh Shekhawat for the book!"
A Must Have Book For Any Engineer
"I have worked on AWS Glue and Athena before so thought to check the corresponding chapters and i must say these have been written in a language which beginners can comprehend easily. I would highly suggest this book for any one who wants to understand how and when to use cloud technologies. This book also provides real life system design problems so this book doesnot only teach you AWS services in depth but also how can you apply these in real world."
The most thorough handbook on system design and scaling at all levels - MVP to widely successful
"With all the AI innovations in coding assistance today, people are seriously underestimating the value of sound fundamentals! AI can help you build components or maybe even a workable MVP. But, you still need to get the foundations right to have any chance of building a real, revenue making, and sustainable business. This book did an amazing job at discussing the foundations in a practical setting - I thoroughly enjoyed the practical examples that keep it more connected to real world applications. And the use of Day 0, Scaling and Day N architectures clearly highlight how practical production systems evolve. The authors cleverly avoided the common pitfall of recommending over engineered system design / architectures. Most other technical books tend to miss the mark in the hunt for deep theoretical rigour, this one hits that spot perfectly!
10/10 - cannot recommend this enough! Let AI write your code, but get your foundations right here!"
"I recently started exploring "System Design on AWS: Building and Scaling Enterprise Solutions," co-authored by Jayanth Kumar and Mandeep Singh—and it's been a great read so far!
What grabbed my attention right away was how clearly the book connects foundational concepts with real-world scenarios. It covers practical topics that anyone building scalable systems needs to know: from smart caching strategies and choosing the right type of database (relational vs. non-relational) to effectively balancing traffic and ensuring system reliability and availability.
Given how quickly technology is evolving today, the insights from this book are incredibly timely. With cloud technologies becoming the backbone of almost every digital product, understanding robust system design has never been more critical—especially if you're building AI-driven solutions. No matter what AI-driven project you're tackling, having a solid grasp of these system design principles ensures your solution can scale efficiently, perform reliably, and meet user expectations.
Jayanth Kumar's extensive experience and clear explanations simplify complex topics, making the content highly approachable and valuable.
Whether you're a student, engineer, or someone passionate about cloud and systems architecture, there's plenty to learn and apply here."
"What sets this book apart is its comprehensive approach to system design on AWS. From exploring the fundamentals of system design concepts to detailing specific AWS services, Kumar and Singh provide a holistic view of building enterprise solutions. They cover essential topics such as storage solutions, caching strategies, and scaling mechanisms within AWS’s powerful ecosystem. This practical, hands-on approach ensures that readers can immediately apply these concepts to real-world scenarios.
I encourage you to approach this book as a launchpad for reimagining what’s possible with modern cloud architecture on AWS. The ability to design, build, and maintain high-performance systems on AWS will set your digital business apart. When the difference between success and failure often lies in the architecture of our systems, this book couldn’t be more timely or essential for anyone looking to harness the full power of AWS."
👥 About the Authors
❤️ Wall of Love
🎥 Companion System Design Videos on YouTube
🌐 Read the Book in Your Language
Book Giveaways
