Architect a geo-distributed Ad Serving Engine
Last updated: September 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
CrowdStrike
September 6, 20253
5
4,369 solved
Design a geo-distributed ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at CrowdStrike. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. CrowdStrike values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Ad Request Handling: The system must handle millions of ad requests per second from various geographic locations.
- Ad Selection Algorithm: Implement an algorit...
Capacity Estimation
Let's estimate the capacity based on the following assumptions:
- Total Ad Requests: 10 million requests per second.
- Average Response Size: 2 KB (including metadata and ad content).
- **Dail...
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