# System Atlas

## Description
System Atlas is a system design interview preparation app with three main public surfaces:
- `/guide`: structured lessons covering fundamentals, components, and advanced distributed systems patterns
- `/simulation`: interactive labs for concepts like CAP theorem, load balancing, caching, rate limiting, and message queues
- `/gallery`: public architecture examples that connect concrete systems to related guides and simulations

## Public Entry Points
- `/`
- `/guide`
- `/simulation`
- `/gallery`

## Guide Tracks
- `01-introduction`: start with `/guide/01-introduction/what-is-system-design`
- `02-fundamentals`: performance vs scalability, latency vs throughput, CAP-style tradeoffs, back-of-envelope estimation
- `03-components`: DNS, CDN, load balancing, API gateway, databases, storage, caching, message queues, communication protocols, service discovery
- `04-advanced-patterns`: monitoring and observability, distributed patterns, security, performance antipatterns

## Simulation Topics
- Core tradeoffs: capacity estimation, CAP theorem
- Traffic, networking, and edge: load balancer, CDN, API gateway, service discovery, proxies
- Data and state: sharding, replication, caching, database indexes, bloom filters, LSM trees, object storage, consistent hashing
- Async and distributed coordination: message queues, sagas, gossip, consensus
- Reliability and security: circuit breakers, rate limiting

## Architecture Gallery
- `/gallery/netflix-system-design`
- `/gallery/whatsapp-chat-architecture`
- `/gallery/payment-gateway-architecture`
- `/gallery/kafka-retry-pipeline`
- `/gallery/rate-limiter-system-design`
- `/gallery/ecommerce-checkout-architecture`

## Notes For Retrieval
- Gallery pages are high-level architecture bridges, not full course pages
- Guide pages are the primary learning anchors
- Simulation detail pages are the practice and intuition anchors
- Public pages link into each other to create a learning loop: gallery -> guide -> simulation