API Design & Microservices Course

Description

Design APIs Developers Love. Architect Systems That Scale.

APIs are the contracts that hold modern software together, and microservices are how the world’s largest platforms stay agile at scale. This 8-week, 16-module course teaches you to design, build, and evolve API-first systems — from clean REST endpoints to distributed microservice architectures that handle millions of requests.

What You’ll Build

• RESTful API with OpenAPI Spec — A professionally designed API with versioning, pagination, filtering, HATEOAS links, and auto-generated interactive documentation
• GraphQL Federation Gateway — A federated GraphQL API combining multiple data sources with efficient query resolution, caching, and real-time subscriptions
• Microservices E-Commerce System — A distributed system with independent services for users, products, orders, payments, and notifications — communicating via message queues and event-driven architecture

Curriculum Overview — 16 Modules

API Design Principles (Weeks 1–2): REST maturity model (Richardson), resource naming and URL design, HTTP methods, status codes, and headers, idempotency and safety guarantees, versioning strategies (URL, header, content negotiation), pagination, filtering, sorting, and field selection

Beyond REST (Weeks 3–4): GraphQL schema design and resolvers, query optimization and the N+1 problem, real-time with GraphQL subscriptions, gRPC and Protocol Buffers, choosing the right API style for your use case

Microservices Architecture (Weeks 5–7): Monolith to microservices decomposition strategies, service boundaries and domain-driven design, inter-service communication (sync vs async), message brokers (RabbitMQ, Redis Streams), event-driven architecture and CQRS, saga pattern for distributed transactions, API gateway patterns

Production Concerns (Week 8): Service discovery and load balancing, circuit breakers and resilience patterns, distributed tracing and observability, contract testing for API consumers, API security (OAuth2 flows, API keys, rate limiting), documentation as a product

What’s Included

• 16 architecture-focused modules
• 80+ design challenges and system design exercises
• 3 production-grade API and microservices projects
• AI-powered architecture reviews
• Private architecture community channel
• Certificate of completion
• Lifetime access to all materials and future updates

Who This Is For

Backend developers leveling up to senior/architect roles, full-stack developers wanting deeper backend architecture knowledge, engineers preparing for system design interviews, or CTOs and tech leads making technology decisions. Solid backend development experience recommended.