Design Feed Generation Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: January 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Palo Alto Networks
January 10, 202634
5
2,823 solved
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Palo Alto Networks 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 a region-wide outage?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Feed Generation: Generate real-time feeds based on IoT device data inputs.
- Device Authentication: Ensure secure authentication of devices before al...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Palo Alto Networks has approximately 1 million IoT devices.
- Request Rate: Each device sends data every 10 seconds.
- Total Requests: 1 million devices * 6 requests per minute = ...
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