Design a event-driven Rate Limiting System
Last updated: September 16, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HashiCorp
September 16, 202527
4
4,556 solved
Design a event-driven rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HashiCorp asks this during the Onsite to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Explain the concept clearly with a practical example
- Discuss when and why to apply this principle
- Identify common mistakes and anti-patterns
- Compare with alternative approaches
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
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Core Design Principles
For this rate limiting system, we will apply the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) to separate the concerns of request handling, rate limiting logic, and data storage. This ensures that each c...
Architecture
The architecture will follow an event-driven microservices model. We will use a message broker (e.g., Kafka) to queue incoming requests, which allows us to decouple the rate limiting logic from re...
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