Design a real-time Feed Generation System
Last updated: September 28, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow
System Design
Software Engineer
ServiceNow
September 28, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
593
9
2,382 solved
Design a real-time feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow 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
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Database selection and data modeling
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
API design and rate limiting
High-level architecture and component design
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 migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Feed Generation: Ability to generate and deliver feeds that reflect real-time updates from various services within ServiceNow.
- **User Customi...
Capacity Estimation
- Estimating Requests:
If we assume ServiceNow has 1 million users, and each user requests an update on average 10 times per hour, this leads to:- Total requests per hour = 1,000,000 user...
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