Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: August 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow
August 9, 2025300
7
1,716 solved
Design a event-driven 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 Onsite 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
- 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?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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:
- Generate short URLs for given long URLs.
- Redirect users from short URLs to the original long URLs.
- Provide an API for IoT devices to create and retrieve shor...
Capacity Estimation
- Expected Scale:
- Assume 10 million IoT devices, each making an average of 10 requests per day (shortening and redirection).
- Total requests: 10 million devices * 10 requests = 100 million ...
Submit Your Answer
