Design a high-throughput Inventory Management System

Last updated: July 25, 2025

Quick Overview

Design a high-throughput inventory management system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.

Walmart
System Design
Software Engineer
Walmart
July 25, 2025
Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium

797

4

860 solved


Design a high-throughput inventory management system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.

How to Approach This
  1. Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
  2. Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
  3. Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
  4. Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
  5. Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
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Sample Answer
Requirements

Functional Requirements

  1. Real-time Inventory Tracking: Track inventory levels at multiple Walmart locations in real-time.
  2. Order Management: Allow for placing, updating, and canceling ...
Capacity Estimation

For Walmart's inventory management system:

  • Estimated Number of Transactions: Assume 10 million transactions per day, which translates to approximately 115 transactions per second.
  • **Data Volum...

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