Architect a distributed Ad Serving Engine
Last updated: March 20, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
CrowdStrike
March 20, 2026283
10
4,407 solved
Design a distributed ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at CrowdStrike typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Ad Selection: The system should select the most relevant ads based on user context (location, behavior, etc.) in real-time.
- Ad Delivery: Serve ads to users wi...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming CrowdStrike serves ads to about 100 million users daily, with an average of 10 ad requests per user:
- Total Daily Requests: 100M users * 10 requests/user = 1 billion requests per day.
- ...
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