Design a Load Balancing for Adobe
Last updated: June 4, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
System Design
Software Engineer
Adobe
June 4, 2026Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Hard
1
4
1,614 solved
Design a event-driven load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe 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
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
Database selection and data modeling
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Partitioning and sharding strategies
API design and rate limiting
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- The system must distribute millions of incoming requests across multiple servers in real-time.
- It should support event-driven architecture to handle asynchronous...
Capacity Estimation
- Daily Active Users: Assume 10 million users.
- Requests per User: Average of 100 requests per day leads to 1 billion requests per day.
- Peak Load Estimation: During peak hours, assume 2...
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