A big focus of our System Design course is to bridge the gap of interview candidates not having actual hands-on distributed computing and cloud computing experiences and only knowing common System Design buzzwords and jargons and superficial concepts and theories without knowing how they are actually implemented in real-world projects adhering to industry standard best practices. So we highly recommend that after reading every chapter, try to build your own version of a related app using public cloud services.

We will be using Azure Cloud in this course, but feel free to use any other public cloud platoform of your choice like AWS, GCP, OCI. To get started, I highly recommend that you try to leverage $200 Free Azure Credits. Here is another useful link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/credit-for-visual-studio-subscribers/ .

One very important thing to keep in mind, especuially if you are beginner: if you are done experimenting with your cloud project and you do not want to get charged for it any further, just by stopping the resource will not stop you from getting charged. Public cloud platforms charges you as long as you have the resource provisioned, no matter if the resource is in stopped state or running state. So the moment you think you do not need a particular resource, please DELETE the resource to avoid getting charged for that resource.

Below is a list of the most common Azure resources that you will be needing to build most of your distributed, scalable apps. I have put links to the relevant documentations that will help you understand how to use them. Always keep in mind that in big tech companies what makes a software engineer great is his/her ability to read documentations and being able to produce production-grade applications leveraging those documentations.

Concepts	Implementation
Create REST API App	ASP.NET Web APIs
Web App	Azure App Service
API App	Azure App Service
Load balancer	Azure Loadbalancer
Geo DNS	Azure Traffic Manager
Messaging Queue and Decoupling Microservices	Azure Queue
Pub/Sub	Azure Service Bus
NoSQL Database	CosmosDB
SQL Database	Azure SQL
Blob Storage	Azure Blob Storage
How to securely store certificates, secrets and keys (passwords, credentials) to make sure there is no credentials stored in production code?	Key Vault
Authentication	Azure Active Directory (AAD)
Serverless Architecture	Azure Function
All Other Azure Services	Master List
Pricing	Azure Pricing Calculator