Design a scalable Analytics System
Last updated: October 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zscaler
System Design
Software Engineer
Zscaler
October 14, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Hard
489
8
1,156 solved
Design a scalable analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zscaler asks this during the Technical Screen 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
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Consistency models and replication
Security and authentication
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
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Ingest and analyze millions of logs and requests in real-time.
- Provide analytics and dashboards for users to visualize data.
- Enable user-defined alerts based...
Capacity Estimation
- Daily Requests: Assuming 10 million requests per day, that's roughly 115 requests per second.
- Data Size: If each request generates 1 KB of logs, total daily data will be about 10 GB.
- **R...
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