13 hands-on labs for automation builders
Learn system design by breaking things.
Fire the same webhook twice. Flood an API. Cut the network between two databases. Kill the leader. Every lab is a live simulator you poke at, and every one ends with where it shows up in your Pabbly workflows.
Lead forma client's website
Your workflowchecks the key, queues it
CRMsometimes says 500
Queuepaces calls to 5/sec
0delivered
0retried with backoff
0duplicates blocked
Line 1 · Learn these now
Core: what makes client automations reliable
Seven ideas that decide whether a workflow survives real traffic, flaky APIs and retries.
Do these in order. Each one builds on the last: retries need idempotency, queues need retries, async needs all three.
- 01 Idempotency The same event twice should do the work once.
- 02 Retries & backoff Fail, wait, try again, without making it worse.
- 03 Rate limits & queues When 500 rows arrive and the API takes 10 a second.
- 04 Source of truth One system owns each piece of data. Everything else copies.
- 05 Sync vs async Answer now, or answer when it's done.
- 06 Auth & secrets Who can call you, and what a leaked key can do.
- 07 Observability Find out it broke before your client does.
Line 2 · Skip for now, come back curious
Advanced: how big systems survive scale
Caching, load balancers, sharding, replication, consensus and microservices.
You won't build these into a workflow next week, but you'll understand what your AI and your SaaS vendors are doing under the hood.
- 01 Caching Remember answers so you don't ask twice.
- 02 Load balancing Spread work across servers and route around dead ones.
- 03 Sharding & consistent hashing Split data across machines, and add machines without chaos.
- 04 Replication & CAP Copies everywhere, until the network splits.
- 05 Consensus (Raft) How a group of servers agrees on one truth.
- 06 Microservices & circuit breakers Many small services, and stopping one failure from sinking the rest.