System design

Intermediate

URL shortener

Design a service that creates short links and redirects 12,000 visitors per second, with a monthly budget of 2,500 dollars.

Redirects outnumber new links a hundred to one, and a small set of viral links gets most of the clicks. At 15:00 an instance will fail.

What your design must achieve

  • Availability ≥ 99.9 %
  • Latency p99 < 100 ms
  • Infrastructure cost per month < 2,500 $

What you will master