Design Task Scheduling Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: December 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven task scheduling system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow
December 13, 202599
6
3,708 solved
Design a event-driven task scheduling 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 ServiceNow. 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. ServiceNow 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 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Task Scheduling: The system should allow scheduling of tasks for IoT devices based on events received.
- Event Handling: The system must process millions of inc...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming ServiceNow plans to handle 10 million events daily from IoT devices:
- Peak Load: If we estimate peak loads, it might reach up to 200,000 events per minute.
- Task Scheduling: Each ev...
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