Design Logging Infrastructure for real-time analytics
Last updated: August 15, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Postmates
August 15, 2025285
11
227 solved
Design a event-driven logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Postmates. 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. Postmates 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?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Capture event logs from various microservices within Postmates in real-time.
- Support querying logs for analytics and monitoring purposes.
- Enable filtering an...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume Postmates has around 20 million users.
- Events per User: On average, each user generates around 5 events per session (order placed, payment processed, delivery updated, ...
Submit Your Answer
