Design a distributed URL Shortening System
Last updated: July 8, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
July 8, 20258
4
1,029 solved
Design a distributed url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Adobe 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
- 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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Generate a unique shortened URL for a given long URL.
- Redirect users from the shortened URL to the original long URL.
- Provide an API for users to shorten URL...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Adobe's URL shortening service handles 1 million requests per day:
- Requests per second (RPS):
- Average request distribution: 1,000,000 requests/day ÷ 86400 seconds/day ≈ 11.57 RPS. ...
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