Design a low-latency URL Shortening System
Last updated: April 2, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Splunk
System Design
Software Engineer
Splunk
April 2, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Hard
134
6
369 solved
Design a low-latency url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Splunk asks this during the System Design Round 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
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Message queues and async processing
Database selection and data modeling
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Partitioning and sharding strategies
API design and rate limiting
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
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- URL Shortening: Users should be able to submit long URLs and receive a short, unique identifier.
- Redirection: When a short URL is accessed, the system should ...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Let's assume we expect 10 million active users.
- Requests Per User: If each user generates 5 requests per day, that results in 50 million requests daily.
- Peak Load: Duri...
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