Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: January 19, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase
January 19, 2026297
7
1,035 solved
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase asks this during the System Design Round to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design the full ML lifecycle from data collection to model monitoring
- Address cold start, exploration/exploitation, and model freshness
- Discuss multi-objective optimization and ranking systems
- Plan for model debugging, fairness, and bias mitigation
- Design the feature store and training pipeline for scale
- Address model versioning, canary deployments, and rollback strategies
- Discuss the data flywheel and long-term system evolution
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 is your model retraining strategy?
- What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Generate a short URL for a provided long URL.
- Redirect users from short URLs to the original long URLs.
- Track analytics on link clicks (e.g., count, geograph...
Capacity Estimation
For a URL shortening service handling millions of requests:
- Assumptions:
- Average of 10 million requests per day.
- Each request results in a read (redirect) or write (create a short URL). ...
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