Build a distributed Data Pipeline Pipeline
Last updated: October 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Apple
October 9, 202538
14
2,491 solved
Design a distributed data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Apple asks this during the System Design Round 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
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Data Ingestion: The pipeline should support ingestion of streaming data from various sources like mobile apps, IoT devices, and user interactions.
- **Real-time Pro...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Apple has 1 million active users generating an average of 10 events per user per day:
- Total Events per Day = 1,000,000 users * 10 events = 10,000,000 events/day.
- Per Second Load =...
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