Build a fault-tolerant URL Shortening Pipeline
Last updated: September 8, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
September 8, 202521
6
456 solved
Design a fault-tolerant url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe asks this during the System Design Round to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Map the business problem to a concrete ML objective
- Propose reasonable features and a baseline model
- Discuss basic model evaluation metrics
- Outline a simple serving architecture
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 is your model retraining strategy?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Shorten URL: Accept a long URL and return a shortened version.
- Redirect: Map the shortened URL back to the original URL upon access.
- Analytics: Track c...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Adobe expects around 5 million URL shortening requests per day:
- Requests per Second:
- requests per second.
- **Storage Requ...
Submit Your Answer
