Build a distributed Feature Flag Pipeline
Last updated: October 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed feature flag system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
TikTok
October 27, 202515
3
3,551 solved
Design a distributed feature flag system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
TikTok 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
- 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 happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Feature Flag Creation and Management: Users should be able to create, update, and delete feature flags through a user-friendly dashboard.
- Real-time Updates: C...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming TikTok has approximately 1 billion active users, and each user makes an average of 10 requests per day related to feature flags:
- Total Daily Requests: 1 billion users * 10 requests = 1...
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