Design Feed Generation Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: February 8, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian
February 8, 202618
12
2,860 solved
Design a fault-tolerant feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian asks this during the Technical Screen 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
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Feed Generation: The system must process and generate feeds based on data from millions of IoT devices in real-time.
- Data Ingestion: Support high-throughput ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming:
- Number of Devices: 10 million IoT devices.
- Requests per Device: Each device sends data 10 times per minute.
- Total Requests: 10 million devices * 10 requests/minute = 100 mi...
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