Core Syllabus & Competencies
Our curriculum replaces abstract computer science toy programs with hardened production blueprints. Every module requires unit tests, integration stress harnesses, and benchmark documentation.
Module 101: Distributed Consensus & The Raft Protocol
Understand how modern cloud-native databases achieve durability in hostile, high-latency network partitions. You will design and code an operational state replication coordinator.
| Phase | Core Technical Competencies | Required Deliverable | Benchmarking Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1-3 | RPC interfaces, heartbeat timers, election state machine | Candidate leader election handler | Zero split-brain states across 500 partitioned nodes |
| Week 4-7 | Log replication, uncommitted entry rolls, append RPCs | Linearizable committed log engine | 99.9th percentile commit latency < 8ms |
| Week 8-11 | Log compaction, snapshots, dynamic cluster reconfiguration | Cluster joint-consensus manager | Live node addition without client dropped sockets |
| Week 12-14 | Chaos injection testing with Jepsen simulation harnesses | Full fault-tolerant Raft test defense | 100% linearizability validation pass |
Module 201: High-Performance LSM Storage Engines
Examine how RocksDB, Cassandra, and ClickHouse structure high-velocity write pipelines. Build a durable log-structured merge-tree datastore from raw POSIX byte channels.
| Phase | Core Technical Competencies | Required Deliverable | Benchmarking Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1-3 | In-memory SkipLists, binary encoding, Write-Ahead Logs | MemTable write batch pipeline | Write throughput exceeding 120,000 ops/sec |
| Week 4-7 | SSTable file layouts, sparse indices, Bloom filter arrays | Read/Write disk serializer | Point lookup false positive rate < 1% |
| Week 8-11 | Leveled & tiered SSTable compaction, tombstone garbage collection | Background compaction worker pool | Write amplification factor < 6.2 under continuous load |
| Week 12-14 | Crash recovery, CRC32 checksums, mmap disk optimizations | Durable ACID-compliant storage node | Zero corrupted records after abrupt power interruption |
Module 301: Asynchronous Event-Driven Network Proxies
Bypass the overhead of thread-per-request servers. Master OS-level non-blocking I/O multiplexing with Linux epoll and kqueue.
| Phase | Core Technical Competencies | Required Deliverable | Benchmarking Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1-4 | Edge-triggered epoll, TCP handshake handling, buffer pools | Event loop socket reader | 100,000 idle concurrent TCP connections |
| Week 5-8 | HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 framing parsers, header compression | Zero-copy request streamer | Memory allocation per request < 256 bytes |
| Week 9-14 | Load balancing policies, circuit breakers, rate limiters | Complete reverse proxy engine | Sub-millisecond proxy overhead at 50,000 RPS |
Module 401: Linux Namespaces, Cgroups & Containerization
Understand the low-level operating system primitives that power Docker, containerd, and Kubernetes clusters without depending on external daemons.
| Phase | Core Technical Competencies | Required Deliverable | Benchmarking Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1-4 | clone(), unshare(), PID, Mount, Network, IPC namespaces | Process sandbox launcher | Complete root isolation verified against kernel escape probes |
| Week 5-8 | Control Groups v2, memory limits, CPU shares, I/O bandwidth capping | Resource governor controller | Sub-millisecond enforcement of memory OOM thresholds |
| Week 9-14 | OverlayFS root filesystem mounting, veth network pairs, iptables NAT | Production OCI micro-runtime | Container spin-up time under 45 milliseconds |
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