Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: November 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Salesforce
November 14, 20255
14
2,275 solved
Design a event-driven url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Salesforce asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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
- URL Shortening: The system must accept long URLs and return a unique short URL.
- Redirection: When a short URL is accessed, it should redirect to the original ...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, let's assume:
- Daily Requests: 5 million requests for URL shortening and redirection combined.
- Peak Hour Requests: 20% of daily traffic occurs in peak hours, hence 1 m...
Submit Your Answer
