Design a multi-tenant Inventory Management System
Last updated: June 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HashiCorp
June 10, 202649
6
4,807 solved
Design a multi-tenant inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at HashiCorp. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. HashiCorp values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenancy: The system should support multiple tenants (clients) isolating their inventories.
- CRUD Operations: Users should be able to create, read, update...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming HashiCorp plans to handle 10 million users with an average of 10 requests per user per day:
- Daily Requests: 10 million users * 10 requests/user = 100 million requests/day.
- **Requests ...
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