Design Messaging Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: May 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Splunk
May 10, 2026154
12
3,684 solved
Design a low-latency messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Splunk's Technical Screen tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
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?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a low-latency messaging infrastructure at Splunk, the core design principles include:
- Separation of Concerns: Each microservice should focus on a specific task, allowing for easi...
Architecture
A suitable architectural approach for the messaging system would be a publish-subscribe model using a message broker like Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ. This architecture supports:
- Decoupling: P...
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