Design Ad Serving Infrastructure for real-time analytics
Last updated: April 22, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase
April 22, 2026226
12
3,301 solved
Design a scalable ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase 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
- 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
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Ad Serving: The system must serve ads in real-time based on user targeting criteria (location, interests, etc.).
- Analytics Tracking: Capture impressions, clic...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, consider the following:
- User Base: Assume Coinbase has 50 million active users.
- Ad Requests: If each user generates 5 ad requests per day, that totals 250 million req...
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