Design a Inventory Management for Atlassian
Last updated: November 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian
November 6, 202541
13
4,782 solved
Design a distributed inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Atlassian. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Atlassian values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
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 handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements Clarification
Before diving into the architecture, clarify the scope with the interviewer. For Inventory Management for Atlassian, key functional requirements inclu...
Capacity Estimation
Estimate the scale to drive design decisions. Assume 100M DAU with an average of 10 actions per user per day = 1B requests/day ~ 12K QPS average, ~36K...
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