2. Design a Distributed Rate Limiter
Enforce tenant quotas across servers while making burst behavior and outage policy explicit.
ClassicMedium
Designs
Pick a system. Work through the problem. Compare your approach.
Classic designs 30
Ordered by design numberCompany tags are community-reported. Counts on cards show how many people reported that design.
Distributed systemsClear filters
3. Design a Distributed Cache
Partition cached data, survive node loss and keep cache misses from overwhelming the source of truth.
ClassicMedium4. Design a Notification System
Deliver email, push and SMS with preferences, retries and honest delivery status.
ClassicMedium5. Design a Chat System
Send durable messages, reconnect devices and explain ordering and delivery receipts.
ClassicMedium6. Design a News Feed
Build a paginated feed that handles high-fan-out authors, fresh posts and visibility changes.
ClassicMedium11. Design a Container Orchestrator
Reconcile desired workloads, schedule containers and recover from failed nodes safely.
ClassicHard40. Design an Ad Click Aggregator
Count every ad click once, fast enough to chart live and exactly enough to bill. One-hour interview boards for junior, senior and staff: requirements, data layer, low-level design and what goes wrong at every component.
ClassicMedium42. Design a Metrics Monitoring Platform
Collect 5 million samples a second from 500,000 hosts, store them as time series, chart them and page people.
ClassicMedium43. Design YouTube Top-K
The K most-viewed videos for the last hour, day, month and all time from 700,000 views a second, exactly and in milliseconds.
ClassicMedium44. Design a Price Tracking Service
Watch prices on 500 million products with a polite crawler and a million browsers, verify what you are told, and notify subscribers within minutes of a drop.
ClassicMedium49. Design an Online Auction like eBay
Take bids on 10 million live auctions with one consistent highest bid, lose none, push the price to every watcher and end each auction fairly.
ClassicMedium52. Design a Payment System like Stripe
Charge cards through the networks exactly once: idempotency keys, a card vault, timeouts as unknowns, signed webhooks, a double-entry ledger and reconciliation. One-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
ClassicMedium57. Design Post Search like Facebook
Search a billion posts a day by keyword, newest or most liked first, with an inverted index you build yourself.
ClassicMedium61. Design a Collaborative Editor like Google Docs
A hundred people typing in one document, every copy converging, nothing acknowledged lost: one owner per document, an op log with snapshots, and fenced failover.
ClassicMedium67. Design for Write Scale: A Million Writes a Second
A live TV vote at a million writes a second: spread by key, buffer in Kafka, aggregate the hot counter in two stages, shed what can wait.
ClassicMedium70. Design an In-Memory Data Store like Redis
An in-memory data store like Redis, from one event loop to Redis Cluster to a durable platform.
ClassicMedium71. Design a Search Engine like Elasticsearch
Search a billion documents in 200 ms: inverted indexes, analysers, Lucene segments, shards and replicas, query then fetch with BM25, fed by CDC.
ClassicMedium72. Design a Distributed Log like Kafka
A partitioned, replicated append-only log: a million messages a second, order per key, nothing acknowledged ever lost, a week of replayable history.
ClassicMedium75. Design a Key-Value Store like DynamoDB
A key-value store like DynamoDB, from one durable node to Paxos-replicated partitions to global tables run for thousands of tenants.
ClassicMedium76. Design a Relational Database like PostgreSQL
A relational database like PostgreSQL: WAL and MVCC on one server, quorum replication and failover, then a sharded fleet.
ClassicMedium77. Design a Stream Processor like Flink
A stateful stream processor: dataflow graphs, keyed state in RocksDB, event time and watermarks, windows, barrier checkpoints, exactly-once into Kafka.
ClassicMedium78. Design a Coordination Service like ZooKeeper
A coordination service like ZooKeeper: znodes, sessions and watches, a ZAB quorum of five with observers, and the recipes for elections and locks.
ClassicMedium85. Design a Change Data Capture Pipeline
Every committed change in Aurora and DynamoDB, read from the log and delivered in order per row to search, caches, Redshift and an S3 lake.
ClassicMedium88. Design a Reviews and Ratings System
Dish reviews only from customers who ordered them, votes counted from a change stream, reviews ranked by the Wilson bound, payouts made exactly once.
ClassicMedium89. Design a Donations Website for a Charity Event
Ten charities, three days, $100 M: charge through a third-party processor exactly once, queue the broadcast spikes, keep live totals on sharded counters. One-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
ClassicMedium93. Design a Real-Time Game Leaderboard
Rank 200 million players in real time with sharded Redis sorted sets, count every game exactly once, and close a season fairly.
ClassicMedium94. Design a Driver Heatmap
Count 4 million moving drivers per map cell from a million pings a second, and serve the density to a million viewers as cached map tiles.
ClassicMedium97. Design a Distributed Logging and Error Tracking System
Ten terabytes of logs an hour from host agents through Kafka into tiered OpenSearch and S3, with regex search, live tail and exceptions grouped into issues.
ClassicMedium100. Design a Distributed File System
Billions of files, hundreds of petabytes, one strongly consistent tree: a namespace partitioned by directory, chunk servers, replication, repair, erasure coding. One-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
ClassicMedium101. Design a Webhook Delivery System
Signed HTTPS callbacks for a billion events a day, at least once, retried for three days, with no endpoint able to slow another.
ClassicMedium