Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: April 30, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Dropbox
April 30, 2026188
3
1,074 solved
Design a high-throughput url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Dropbox typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements Clarification
Before diving into the architecture, clarify the scope with the interviewer. For URL Shortening Infrastructure for mobile apps, key functional require...
Capacity Estimation
Estimate the scale to drive design decisions. Assume 100M DAU with an average of 10 actions per user per day = 1B requests/day ~ 12K QPS average, ~36K...
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