Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: April 7, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Confluent
April 7, 202631
11
372 solved
Design a real-time url shortening 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 Confluent. 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. Confluent values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
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 happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Generate short URLs for long URLs provided by IoT devices.
- Redirect requests from short URLs to their original long URLs in real-time.
- Allow users t...
Capacity Estimation
- Assumptions:
- There are 1 million IoT devices sending requests to shorten URLs.
- Each device sends 10 requests per minute.
- Peak load is expected to be 10x average load.
-...
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