Design a Load Balancing Service
Last updated: March 8, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Stripe
March 8, 202629
10
549 solved
Design a low-latency load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Stripe typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
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?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Request Distribution: The system must efficiently distribute incoming traffic across multiple backend servers to ensure optimal resource utilization.
- **Health Che...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Stripe handles approximately 1 billion requests per day, we can break down the capacity needs as follows:
- Requests per second: 1 billion requests/day = ~11,574 requests/second.
- **Pea...
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