Design Analytics Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: July 17, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
July 17, 2025119
7
3,861 solved
Design a distributed analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Optiver. 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. Optiver values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Data Ingestion: The system should handle real-time data ingestion from multiple microservices, enabling analytics on market data, trades, and user interactions.
- *...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate the capacity:
- User Base: Assume 10,000 concurrent users interacting with the system.
- Requests per User: Each user generates approximately 100 requests per second during peak ...
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