System requirements

Functional:

receive long URL, return shortened url

receive shortened URL, redirect to long url

Non-Functional:

should be highly available (aka fast)

Capacity estimation

100s of users per minute

API design

REST

shorten

retrieve

Database design

one table

columns:

original url, shortened url, created_at

High-level design

You should identify enough components that are needed to solve the actual problem from end to end. Also remember to draw a block diagram using the diagramming tool to augment your design. If you are unfamiliar with the tool, you can simply describe your design to the chat bot and ask it to generate a starter diagram for you to modify...

Request flows

Pretty simple. only two possible types of request, basically a save and retrieve.

save will take long url, generate. short url, then return it to the client

retrieve will take short url, map it back to long, and redirect

Detailed component design

Trade offs/Tech choices

wanted to keep this as simple as possible. no need for users or auth

Failure scenarios/bottlenecks

extremely high use could bog it down

many stale URLs, could be cleaned up

Future improvements

add periodic cleanup logic or expiration