Design a distributed Load Balancing System
Last updated: June 4, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grafana Labs
June 4, 202644
14
2,230 solved
Design a distributed load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Grafana Labs 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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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 Clarification
Before diving into the architecture, clarify the scope with the interviewer. For distributed Load Balancing System, key functional requirements includ...
Capacity Estimation
Estimate the scale to drive design decisions. Assume 100M DAU with an average of 10 actions per user per day = 1B requests/day ~ 12K QPS average, ~36K...
Submit Your Answer
