Back to System Design
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Phase 8

Security & Reliability

A system is only as good as its weakest link. Learn to design for security, compliance, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.

1

System Security: Authentication, Authorization, and Common Vulnerabilities

Learn essential security concepts including authentication methods, authorization patterns, common vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10), and secure system design.

securityauthenticationauthorization
2

Reliability Patterns: Circuit Breakers, Retries, Fallbacks, and Graceful Degradation

Learn how to build reliable systems that handle failures gracefully. Cover circuit breakers, retry strategies, timeouts, bulkheads, and graceful degradation patterns.

reliabilitycircuit breakerretry
3

Data Encryption and Secrets Management: At Rest, In Transit, and Everywhere Between

Learn encryption at rest and in transit, symmetric vs asymmetric cryptography, envelope encryption and KMS, secrets management with Vault, key rotation, HSMs, and field-level encryption.

encryptionTLSsecrets management
4

DDoS Protection and Web Application Firewalls: Defending the Edge

Learn DDoS attack categories (volumetric, protocol, application-layer), mitigation architecture with scrubbing centers and anycast, WAF rules for SQLi/XSS/CSRF, bot detection, and CAPTCHA tradeoffs.

DDoSWAFbot detection
5

Disaster Recovery and Backups: RPO, RTO, Multi-Region Failover, and DR Testing

Learn how to design for disaster recovery: RPO vs RTO, full/incremental/differential backup strategies, multi-region failover architecture, active-active vs active-passive, DR tiers, and game-day testing.

disaster recoverybackupsRPO
6

Compliance and Data Governance: GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and Data Sovereignty

Learn how regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS shape system design, plus data classification, retention policies, audit logging, and cross-border data transfer.

complianceGDPRHIPAA