Design a A/B Testing for Vercel
Last updated: July 19, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time a/b testing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Vercel
July 19, 202531
9
4,282 solved
Design a real-time a/b testing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Vercel 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
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- A/B Test Creation: Users can create A/B tests with different variations and define metrics for success.
- Real-Time Traffic Distribution: The system should hand...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Vercel serves around 10 million requests daily for A/B testing:
- Requests per second: 10 million / (24 * 60 * 60) = ~115.74 requests/second.
- Traffic Distribution: If each A/B test ...
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