Design a Feed Generation Service
Last updated: August 5, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase
System Design
Product Manager
Coinbase
August 5, 2025Product Manager
System Design Round
System Design
Easy
46
15
3,007 solved
Design a multi-tenant feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase asks this during the System Design Round to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Database selection and data modeling
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Consistency models and replication
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
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 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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
- Functional Requirements:
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must support multiple clients (tenants) accessing personalized feeds.
- Real-Time Feed Generation: Generate user feeds in ...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume Coinbase has 10 million active users.
- Feed Requests: If each user requests their feed 10 times a minute, that equates to:
- 10 million users * 10 requests/user/minute =...
Submit Your Answer
Markdown supported