Build a geo-distributed Rate Limiting Pipeline
Last updated: March 14, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Meta
System Design
Software Engineer
Meta
March 14, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
47
12
515 solved
Design a geo-distributed rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Meta typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
High-level architecture and component design
Consistency models and replication
Security and authentication
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Failure handling and fault tolerance
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 schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Request Handling: The system must handle rate limiting for APIs and services, ensuring that users do not exceed predefined limits.
- Geo-Distribution: The syste...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- Expected Users: Assume 100 million active users.
- Requests per User: If each user makes an average of 10 requests per minute, that results in:
- **Total ...
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