Build a distributed URL Shortening Pipeline
Last updated: November 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Datadog
November 26, 2025177
5
3,122 solved
Design a distributed url shortening 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 Datadog. 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. Datadog values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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 would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Shorten URL: Users should be able to submit a long URL and receive a shortened version.
- Redirect: When a shortened URL is accessed, users should be...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming we expect to handle 10 million URL shortening requests per day:
- Requests per second (RPS):
- 10,000,000 requests/day / 86400 seconds/day = ~115.7 RPS.
- **Read to Write Ratio...
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