Architect a geo-distributed Messaging Engine
Last updated: October 22, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
October 22, 20255
15
4,206 solved
Design a geo-distributed messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe asks this during the Onsite to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Message Delivery: The system must support sending and receiving messages in real-time across different geographic locations.
- User Management: Ability to manag...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Adobe has approximately 100 million users globally:
- Active Users: Let's estimate 10% are active at peak times, resulting in 10 million concurrent users.
- Requests per User: If each...
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