Architect a high-throughput Logging Engine
Last updated: August 3, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Shopify
August 3, 20258
15
3,277 solved
Design a high-throughput logging 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 Shopify. 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. Shopify 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
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- High Throughput: The system should log millions of events per second.
- Real-time Processing: Logs should be processed and made available for querying in real-...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Shopify serves around 1 million merchants and each merchant generates 100 log events per second:
- Total QPS: 1,000,000 merchants * 100 logs/merchant = 100 million logs/second.
- **S...
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