Design a Feed Generation Service
Last updated: November 7, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Airbnb
November 7, 20255
3
4,458 solved
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Airbnb asks this during the Onsite 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
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Feed Generation: Generate personalized feeds for users based on their preferences, past bookings, and interactions.
- Real-Time Updates: Provide real-time ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Airbnb has approximately 200 million active users and each user requests their feed 10 times a day, we can estimate:
- Total Requests per Day: 200 million users * 10 requests = 2 billion ...
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