Design URL Shortener

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Practice steps

1. Problem Statement, Functional Requirements, and Scale Assumptions
   Define the URL Shortener product goal, core user actions, explicit non-goals, and starting scale assumptions before proposing components.
2. Non-Functional Requirements
   Choose latency, availability, durability, abuse-prevention, privacy, and observability goals that fit a URL Shortener.
3. Quantitative Analysis
   Estimate write QPS, redirect QPS, storage footprint, cache pressure, and bandwidth using stated assumptions.
4. API Design
   Define API operations, request/response shapes, validation errors, idempotency expectations, and redirect semantics.
5. High-Level Design
   Propose the main components, data flow, storage boundaries, cache strategy, and redirect path without building learner canvas state yet.
6. Additional High-Level Design Prompts
   Clarify component ownership, data flow, consistency boundaries, and where analytics or abuse controls sit outside the hot redirect path.
7. Deep Dives
   Explore ID generation properties, hot-key mitigation, cache invalidation, data retention, and failure-mode trade-offs.
8. Final Review Handoff Readiness
   Summarize the design decisions, unresolved risks, and evidence the final reviewer should use for a simulated hiring verdict.

Prerequisites

• System Design Fundamentals
• API Design
• Non-functional Requirements
• Resource Estimation
• Caching
• Data Storage