Design a large-scale URL Shortening Platform
Last updated: May 9, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HubSpot
May 9, 2026296
14
4,896 solved
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HubSpot 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 migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Shortening URLs: Users can submit long URLs to receive a shortened URL.
- Redirection: Users can access the original URL by visiting the shortened URL.
- **Ana...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming HubSpot expects to handle 10 million URLs and an average of 100 requests per URL per day:
- Daily Requests: 10 million URLs * 100 requests = 1 billion requests per day.
- **Per Second Re...
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