Design Logging Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: November 22, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Instacart
November 22, 202512
8
1,949 solved
Design a distributed logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Instacart 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
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Must handle millions of logs from IoT devices in real-time.
- Support log retrieval and querying by device ID, timestamp, and log severity.
- Provide an AP...
Capacity Estimation
- Assume Instacart has 10 million IoT devices, each generating an average of 100 logs per hour.
- This results in:
10,000,000 devices * 100 logs/device/hour = 1,000,000,000 logs/hour
...
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