Design Data Pipeline Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: January 16, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow
January 16, 2026180
12
257 solved
Design a low-latency data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow 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 handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Ingest real-time data from millions of IoT devices (e.g., smart thermostats, sensors).
- Process and store the data for analytical queries and real-time monitoring...
Capacity Estimation
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Assumptions:
- Each IoT device sends data every 5 seconds.
- There are 10 million active devices.
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Data Ingestion Rate:
- Total messages per second = 10 million devices / 5 seconds =...
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