Design Messaging Infrastructure for global users
Last updated: January 31, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Booking.com
January 31, 202629
7
4,356 solved
Design a high-throughput messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Booking.com asks this during the System Design Round to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
For the messaging infrastructure at Booking.com, the core design principles include SOLID principles to ensure clean and maintainable code, particularly the Single Responsibility Principle (SR...
Architecture
The architecture for the messaging system will be microservices-based, utilizing a message broker like Apache Kafka for high-throughput message handling. Each microservice can be independently...
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