Learn How to Think API Protocol Tradeoffs

Prepare for system design interviews by building a deep understanding of API protocol choices.

The focus is strictly on architectural thinking, tradeoff analysis, and interview-ready articulation. You will not get bogged down in implementation details or code syntax. Instead, you will learn to see the matrix of decisions. Like latency, caching, type safety, and coupling.

When designing APIs for large scale systems in system design interviews, the protocol you choose (REST, GraphQL, or gRPC) dictates your system's performance ceiling and developer experience. This course gives you the mental models to make those choices confidently.

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What You Will Achieve

By the end of this course, you will possess the vocabulary and strategic insight to:

  • Explain APIs at an architectural level, defining boundaries, contracts, and independent evolution clearly

  • Articulate the fundamental differences between REST, GraphQL, and gRPC without hesitation.

  • Analyze tradeoffs across critical dimensions like latency, bandwidth, caching strategies, and operational complexity.

  • Solve specific architectural problems like over/under-fetching (GraphQL) or high-performance internal communication (gRPC).

  • Evaluate the hidden costs of protocols, from developer onboarding time to debugging challenges in production.

Course curriculum

    1. What API Protocol Design Really Means

      FREE PREVIEW

    2. Three Levels of Evaluation

    3. Why REST Isn't Always the Right Choice

    4. The Purpose of APIs: Contracts, Encapsulation and Independence

    1. REST Fundamentals: Resources, URIs and the Philosophy Behind It

    2. HTTP Methods and Idempotency: Why It Matters for Reliability

    3. REST Request: Response Model and Status Codes

    4. REST Architectural Constraints: Statelessness and Cacheability

    5. Audience Questions: REST Deep Dive

    1. GraphQL Fundamentals: The Client-Driven Query Philosophy

    2. Building Blocks: Single Endpoint, Schema and Strong Typing

    3. Queries, Mutations and Resolvers

    4. Audience Questions on GraphQL

    5. GraphQL Trade-offs: When It Fits and When It Doesn't

    1. Binary Serialization and Protocol Buffers

    2. Protocol Buffers Deep Dive

    3. Services, Streaming Patterns and Code Generation

    4. HTTP/2 Transport, Multiplexing and Head-of-Line Blocking

    5. gRPC Trade-offs: When High Performance Justifies Complexity

    1. WebSockets: Solving Real-Time Communication Challenges

    2. Pub/Sub Architecture for Horizontal Scale

    3. Server-Sent Events and Interview Pitch Strategies

    1. REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC Recap

    2. Audience Questions: Protocol Selection and Federated GraphQL

    3. How Request Latency Breaks Down Across Protocols

    4. Connection Handling and Serialization Speed Compared

    5. Why Round Trips Dominate API Performance

    1. HTTP Caching with REST

    2. Caching challenges with GraphQL and gRPC

    3. Audience Questions: Caching Mechanics and Validation

    4. Solving Over-Fetching and Under-Fetching with GraphQL

    5. How gRPC Handles Data Efficiency with Custom Types

    6. Audience Questions and Sparse Field Sets

    1. Developer Experience and Onboarding Time by Protocol

    2. Debugging and Operational Complexity Across Protocols

    3. Evolving APIs Without Breaking Clients

    4. Interview Cheat Sheet and Hybrid Architecture Patterns

    1. Practice Scenario: High-Throughput Payment Service

    2. Practice Scenario: E-Commerce Product API

    3. Practice Scenario: Designing a Public Developer API

About this course

  • $50.00
  • 40 lessons
  • 4.5 hours of video content

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