Design a Feature Flag for Oracle
Last updated: December 30, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed feature flag system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle
System Design
Product Manager
Oracle
December 30, 2025Product Manager
Onsite
System Design
Easy
90
12
2,672 solved
Design a distributed feature flag system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Oracle 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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
API design and rate limiting
High-level architecture and component design
Database selection and data modeling
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
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 handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- 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:
- Create Feature Flags: Admin users must be able to create, update, and delete feature flags through an API.
- Toggle Feature Flags: Users must be able to enable...
Capacity Estimation
Estimated Load:
- User Base: Assume 10 million users.
- Feature Flags: Assume 100,000 feature flags.
- Requests: Each user might trigger feature flag evaluations 10 times per sessio...
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