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SDMastery

90-Day Advanced Distributed Systems Roadmap

A 90-day deep mastery plan for engineers who want to specialize in distributed systems and system architecture.

Quick answer: 90-Day Advanced Distributed Systems Roadmap

90-Day Advanced Distributed Systems Roadmap is covered here as a practical system design learning roadmap. A 90-day deep mastery plan for engineers who want to specialize in distributed systems and system architecture. Use it to sequence concepts, tradeoffs, and practice problems so learning compounds instead of becoming random reading.

Focus on the problem being solved, the main design choice, the failure mode, and the tradeoff you would defend in front of a senior engineer. This page is part of the DosiBridge system design knowledge graph, so it links related concepts, interview problems, tradeoffs, and references instead of leaving the topic isolated.

Related reading path

90-Day Distributed Systems Mastery

This plan is for engineers who want to go beyond interview preparation and develop real expertise in distributed systems. It includes reading foundational papers, studying production architectures, and building implementations.

Month 1: Foundations and Papers (Days 1-30)

Weeks 1-2: Core Distributed Systems Theory

  • CAP Theorem deep dive
  • Consistency models (linearizability, sequential, causal, eventual)
  • Consensus: Paxos and Raft (read the Raft paper)
  • Replication strategies
  • Partitioning and sharding

Weeks 3-4: Foundational Papers

Read and summarize these papers:

  • MapReduce (Google, 2004)
  • Google File System (Google, 2003)
  • Dynamo (Amazon, 2007)
  • Bigtable (Google, 2006)
  • Kafka (LinkedIn, 2011)

Month 2: Production Systems (Days 31-60)

Weeks 5-6: Storage Systems

  • LSM-Trees and SSTables
  • B-Trees and database internals
  • Spanner and globally distributed databases
  • ZooKeeper and coordination services
  • Chubby lock service

Weeks 7-8: Real-World Architecture

  • Study 6 engineering case studies (Discord, Netflix, Canva, Airbnb, Stripe, Slack)
  • Implement consistent hashing from scratch
  • Implement a rate limiter from scratch
  • Build a simple distributed key-value store

Month 3: Specialization (Days 61-90)

Weeks 9-10: Advanced Topics

  • CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types)
  • Vector clocks and logical time
  • Distributed transactions (2PC, Saga pattern)
  • Stream processing (exactly-once semantics)

Weeks 11-12: Capstone

  • Design a complete distributed system from scratch
  • Write a technical blog post about what you learned
  • Contribute to an open-source distributed systems project
  • Practice explaining complex topics to non-experts