Design Caching Infrastructure for global users
Last updated: February 1, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant caching system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley
System Design
Product Manager
Morgan Stanley
February 1, 2026Product Manager
Onsite
System Design
Medium
25
13
3,965 solved
Design a multi-tenant caching system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Morgan Stanley typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Security and authentication
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Database selection and data modeling
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?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The caching system must support multiple clients, ensuring data isolation and security.
- Data Types: Support for diverse data types inclu...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculation
- User Base: Assume 1 million global users, each making 10 requests per minute.
- Total Requests: 1,000,000 users * 10 requests/min = 10,000,000 requests/min...
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