Design a real-time Logging System
Last updated: August 11, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
August 11, 20258
4
2,971 solved
Design a real-time logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Figma's Onsite tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
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 testing strategy would you use for this component?
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
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Core Design Principles
For this real-time logging system, we will apply the following core design principles:
- Separation of Concerns: Each component (ingestion, processing, storage) should be independently responsib...
Architecture
The architecture for the logging system will consist of:
- Log Ingestion Service: A RESTful API that receives log messages from various clients. It will validate and forward these logs to a mess...
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