Design Feed Generation Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: September 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
CrowdStrike
September 27, 2025143
7
651 solved
Design a low-latency feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
CrowdStrike 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
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?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Feed Generation: The system should generate real-time feeds based on incoming data from various sources (e.g., threat intelligence, endpoint data).
- API Design...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, we assume:
- Average Requests per User: 10 requests per minute.
- Number of Users: 1 million users.
- Total Requests per Minute: 10M requests.
- **Requests per Second...
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