Design Feed Generation Infrastructure for real-time analytics
Last updated: April 23, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
PlanetScale
April 23, 2026150
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3,991 solved
Design a distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at PlanetScale. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. PlanetScale values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Analytics: The system must generate feeds in real-time based on incoming data requests.
- User Personalization: Each feed should be personalized base...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming the system needs to handle 10 million requests per day:
- Requests per second (RPS): 10,000,000 requests/day ÷ 86,400 seconds/day = ~115 RPS.
- Data Size: If each feed request generat...
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