Design a large-scale Analytics Platform
Last updated: October 20, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Microsoft
System Design
Software Engineer
Microsoft
October 20, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Easy
114
8
1,504 solved
Design a event-driven analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This ML system design question from Microsoft's System Design Round tests your ability to think about ML systems at scale. The interviewer expects discussion of data quality, feature stores, model serving infrastructure, and A/B testing strategy.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Map the business problem to a concrete ML objective
- Propose reasonable features and a baseline model
- Discuss basic model evaluation metrics
- Outline a simple serving architecture
Key Topics to Cover
Feature engineering and feature stores
Model serving and latency optimization
Feedback loops and model retraining
Online vs offline evaluation
Monitoring and model degradation detection
A/B testing and experimentation
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 run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Ingest event data from various sources (e.g., user interactions, transactions) in real-time.
- Provide real-time analytics dashboards for business intelligence...
Capacity Estimation
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Assumptions:
- Each event is approximately 1KB in size.
- We expect to handle 1 million events per second.
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Calculations:
- Total Data Ingestion per second = 1,000,000 events...
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