Architect a geo-distributed Content Delivery Engine
Last updated: September 1, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Splunk
September 1, 202588
12
746 solved
Design a geo-distributed content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Splunk. 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. Splunk values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
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 migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- The system must handle millions of requests per second (QPS) for content retrieval from various geographical locations.
- Content should be delivered with minimal latency...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity for the geo-distributed Content Delivery Engine:
- Assume each user generates 10 requests per minute. With 10 million users, that results in 1.67 million QPS.
- For storage estima...
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