Design a Load Balancing Service
Last updated: September 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Compass
September 27, 2025594
5
736 solved
Design a low-latency load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Compass asks this during the System Design Round to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
For designing the load balancing service at Compass, we will apply the following core design principles:
- Separation of Concerns: By separating the load balancing logic from the application log...
Architecture
The architectural approach for the load balancing service will be as follows:
- Microservices Architecture: The service will be designed as a set of microservices, each responsible for different ...
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