Design AWS Lambda
Last updated: August 15, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for AWS Lambda. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Amazon
System Design
Software Engineer
Amazon
August 15, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
7
15
1,057 solved
Design the architecture for AWS Lambda. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Amazon asks this during the Onsite 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
High-level architecture and component design
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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 a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Function Execution: Users must be able to upload code and trigger functions to execute based on various events (HTTP requests, S3 uploads, etc.).
- **Concurrency Ma...
Capacity Estimation
Capacity Estimation
Assuming AWS Lambda needs to support:
- QPS (Queries per Second): Let's estimate an average of 100,000 concurrent users, each triggering 5 events per minute.
- **Total Even...
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