Data Partitioning And Replication
Inevitably, we will need to scale our database, meaning that we have to partition it so that we can store information about billions of URLs.
- Range-based partitioning: We can store the URLs in separate partitions based on the first letter of its hash key. So, we save all the URLs with the first letter of their hash key being A in one partition and so on.
This approach is problematic because it leads to unbalanced database servers, creating unequal load.
- Hash-based partitioning: With hash-based partitioning, we can take a hash of the object being stored and then calculate which partition to use. The hashing function will randomly distribute the data into different partitions.
Sometimes, this approach leads to overloaded partitions, which can then be solved using Consistent Hashing.
Who Are The Authors Of This Course
This course was developed by Design Gurus, a group of senior engineers and hiring managers whove been working at Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. The authors of this course have a lot of experience in conducting SDIs and know exactly what is being asked at these interviews. Other courses developed by the same team can be found on their website.
Lets evaluate different aspects of this course.
Grokking The System Design Interview Free Download
System design questions have become a standard part of the software engineering interview process. Performance in these interviews reflects upon your ability to work with complex systems and translates into the position and salary the interviewing company offers you.
This course is a complete guide to master the SDIs.
You May Like: What Happens In A Second Interview
Grokking The System Design Interview
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning will make a commission if you buy something via my links, at no extra cost to you. Read my disclosure for more info.
If you consider top-tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Uber, Twitter, Apple, and Facebook, they ask multiple system design live problems to candidates during their interview process.
So, I am providing you with a review of one of the most popular and effective courses on System design.
Hence, there is one of the most popular and effective course, available on educative.io called Grokking the System Design Interview to help and prepare the candidates for system design interviews.
Questions based on standard design have become a crucial part of a system design interview.
However, most engineers struggle with or during system design interviews because of the unstructured nature of these interviews and lack of experience in developing large-scale systems.
Review Of Grokking The System Design Interview Course
Grokking the System Design Interview is an online course developed by Design Gurus. According to its authors, this course has helped more than 60 thousand people to prepare for their System Design Interviews.
System design questions have become a standard part of the software engineering interview process. Companies like Google, , or Amazon put a special focus on system design interviews . If you want to get a reasonable offer, you need to prove your knowledge of designing complex systems.
Most engineers struggle with system design interviews, mainly due to the open-ended nature of design problems that dont have a standard answer. Like coding interviews, candidates who havent put a deliberate effort to prepare for SDIs, mostly perform poorly, especially at top companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. In these companies, candidates who do not perform above average have a limited chance to get an offer. On the other hand, a good performance always results in a better offer since it shows the candidates ability to handle a complex system.
In this post, I will present a candid review of one of the most famous resources that many people have used to prepare for their system design interview: Grokking the System Design Interview.
Recommended Reading: Excel Test For Interview Candidates Free
Basic System Design And Algorithm
The biggest question for our service is how to generate a short and unique key when given an URL. The approach we will be looking at today is by encoding the actual URL.
We can compute a unique hash of the given URL. The hash can then be encoded for display. This encoding could be base36 or base62 . If we add + and /, we can use Base64 encoding. A reasonable question would be, what should be the length of the short key? 6, 8, or 10 characters?
-
Using base64 encoding, a 6 letter long key would result in 64^6 = ~68.7 billion possible strings.
-
Using base64 encoding, an 8 letters long key would result in 64^8 = ~281 trillion possible strings
-
With 68.7B unique strings, letâs assume six letter keys would suffice for our system.
If we use the MD5 algorithm as our hash function, it will produce a 128-bit hash value. After base64 encoding, weâll get a string having more than 21 characters . Now we only have space for 8 characters per short key, how will we choose our key then?
We can take the first 6 letters for the key. This could result in key duplication, to resolve that, we can choose some other characters out of the encoding string or swap some characters.
There are some potential obstacles when taking this approach:
-
If multiple users enter the same URL, they will get the same short link.
-
Parts of the URL can be URL-encoded.
Featured Pragmatic Engineer Jobs
The above jobs score at least 10/12 on The Pragmatic Engineer Test. Browse more senior engineer and engineering leadership roles with great engineering cultures, or add your own on The Pragmatic Engineer Job board and apply to join The Pragmatic Engineer Talent Collective.
Hiring software engineers or managers? Get vetted drops twice a month, from software engineers – full-stack, backend, mobile, frontend, data, ML – and managers currently working at Big Tech, high-growth startups, and places with strong engineering cultures. The last drop had folks at likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Box, Flexpory, Shopify and similar companies. Apply here – spaces are limited.
Newsletter
Recommended Reading: How Many Questions Should You Ask When Interviewing Someone
System Design Interview Pdf
System design interview pdf -View grokking system design interview.pdf from is misc at heritage institute of technology. Grokking the system design interview course. System design is a process of defining the elements of a system such as the architecture, components, modules, and various interfaces. Menu system design interview book review: A) go through cs76 and udacity’s links given above for scaling. System design interview and the coding interview simultaneously. An insider’s guide by accident .i was looking for good book resources after several people have been asking me how they can get better at building distributed systems or learning. This is a softcopy of the educative.io grokking the object oriented design interview and grokking the system design interview. Estimate design the service. System design interview preperation series by codekarle this is a collection of some of the most commonly asked system design interview question explain in a very detailed and straight forward manner.
I’ve come across the book system design interview: System design questions have become a standard part of the software engineering interview process. Architectural design principles decompose into subsystems layers and partitions. System_design/system design inteview by alex xu.pdf. System design interview an insider s guide.
GrokkingtheSystemDesignInterview.pdfCSDN
Grokking the System Design Interview.pdf Load Balancing
Requirements And Goals Of The System
When designing a TinyURL-like application, there are some functional and non-functional requirements to consider.
Non-functional requirements:
-
The system must be highly available. If the service fails, all the short links will not be functional.
-
URL redirection should happen in real-time with minimal latency.
-
Shortened links should not be predictable in any manner.
Functional requirements:
-
When given a URL, our service will generate a shorter alias of the original URL. This new link will be extensively shortened so that it can be easily copied and pasted.
-
The short link should redirect users to the original link.
-
Users should have the option to pick a custom short link for their URL.
-
Short links will expire after a default timespan, but users are able to specify the expiration time.
You May Like: How To Do A Professional Interview
Take Ownership Of Your Education
Big Tech interviews are both fairly standard and widely documented. There is a wealth of resources to prepare for the coding interview and a growing pile of systems design resources.
It’s easy to get lost in so much information: which is why you should make a plan on how you will get “interview-ready”.
Create a study plan with topics you want to cover for the interview types you’re expecting to have. Learn the theory, then practice this with practice and exercises where you create something from scratch: implementing a data structure, drawing up a diagram.
There is no shortage of people complaining about the difficult interview process Big Tech has. However, I know of no other industry where you can get a high-paying job with no college degree, no connections: purely through interviews that are fairly standard among the highest paying employers like Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, Pinterest, and others.
Tech interviews being “standard” across the Big Tech makes preparing for these a high-leverage activity: study once, interview many times. Once you prepare, just make sure your software engineering resume grabs the attention of the recruiters.
Good luck – and if you are looking for more advice for senior and above interviews, I have some.
I Personally Think The Yearly Educativeio Subscription Is The Way To Go
That way, you can feast on this course and hundreds of others. Its also part of a learning path called Ace the Java Coding Interview, which consists of 8 other courses in addition to this one.
In my opinion, you cant go wrong with the subscription even if you just need to prepare for a technical interview.
Also Check: What To Wear To A Job Interview Female
A Few Years Ago A New Online Learning Platform Named Educativeio Wanted To Know If Id Like To Produce A Course For Them
Although I kindly declined , I was intrigued by the platform.
Why?
Well, for one, the course selection on Educative.io is not only robust but wonderfully specific.
For example, Reintroducing React: V16 and Beyond was created for web developers who dabbled in React a year or two ago, but need a modern refresher.
Ruby Concurrency for Senior Engineering Interviews? You dont get more specific than that.
Similarly, theGrokking the System Design Interview course on Educative.io is designed for those who need brushing up on a highly specific skill set: the system design process.
And it was created by hiring managers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
That means this course contains actual Google system design interview questions, for example.
So if youre hoping to land a job at one of the FAANGs , read on.
Design Tinyurl Or Bitly
Given a long URL, how would how would you design service that would generate a shorter and unique alias for it.
Discuss things like:
- How to generate a unique ID for each URL?
- How would you generate unique IDs at scale ?
- How would your service handle redirects?
- How would you support custom short URLs?
- How to delete expired URLs etc?
- How to track click stats?
Don’t Miss: How To Answer Tell Me About Yourself In An Interview
Is Grokking The System Design Interview Worth It
This course is developed by hiring managers working at top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. They have a list of various design problem standards for a different interview with detailed expatiation on all tech and terminologies used in System design interviews.
These questions are repeatedly asked in many interviews, instructor has designed and explained the problem at a basic level till all tech and options are available to design a scalable system and tackle questions that are asked during the flow.
Every example is structured perfectly to cover all requirements and the design of a complete system. Fair assumptions, calculations, and technology have been used to make system more optimal and scalable that is crucial for any SDI interview.
Breadth Of System Design Interview Questions
With 15 system design interview questions, this course did a great job. All the famous design questions have been covered, e.g., Designing Dropbox, Uber, , URL Shortener, , WebCrawler, Messenger, or Typeahead Suggestion. Anyone preparing for SDIs will feel confident after going through these problems.
Also Check: What To Say In Interview Thank You Email
Solution Of Frequently Asked System Design Questions
- Designing a URL Shortening service like TinyURL, bit.ly etc
- Designing Pastebin
- Designing Instagram
- Designing Dropbox
- Designing an API Rate Limiter
- Designing Twitter Search
- Designing Yelp or Nearby Friends
- Designing Uber backend
- Designing Ticketmaster
Capacity Estimation And Constraints
Our system will be read-heavy. There will be a large number of redirection requests compared to new URL shortenings. Letâs assume a 100:1 ratio between read and write.
Traffic estimates: Assuming, we will have 500M new URL shortenings per month, with 100:1 read/write ratio, we can expect 50B redirections during the same period:
One thing to note here is that since there will be a lot of duplicate requests , our actual memory usage will be less than 170GB.
Don’t Miss: How To Prepare For Hr Interview
Grokking The System Design Interview: Who Is This Course Really For
All in all, I really think Grokking the System Design Interview is a high-quality course.
However, its geared towards a specific subgroup of engineers with their sights set on top tech companies like Google and Amazon.
While this is a great course, I wouldnt recommend it to code newbies or new engineers as there is a high opportunity cost.
If youre wondering what I mean by that, check out this review of Cracking the Coding Interview.
If you want to stand out in front of the pack of hungry FAANG applicants, study the system design tools and problem-solving techniques featured in this course.
They just might do wonders for making you stand out when the big day comes to land that FAANG software engineering role.
And if you really want to grok til you drop, read my review on Grokking the Coding Interview.
Grokking the System Design Interview enthusiasts are also reading:
Join More Than 14 Million Learners From Companies Like
Recommended before you start this course
Recommended before you start this course
Recommended before you start this course
Recommended after you finish this course
Recommended after you finish this course
Recommended after you finish this course
What our learners are saying
What our learners are saying
I found your site 24 hours before interviewing at Amazon. It was my 2nd try with Amazon, and I knew that one of the problems they had with me the first time was that I didnt really know how to work through the system design phase of the interview. I spent the day reading the basics section and then read through all of the problems. I not only got an offer from Amazon, the group the guy was from asked me to sign on with them. Relative to the salary offer that followed, the cost of this course was without question the best investment in the history of the universe!
Robert
Great course. After going through it, I think, the real value is in the system design problems. For that alone, its worth it, even for an experienced professional. The course focuses on laying down the thought process for attacking a system design problem. Interviewers are looking for a collaborative communication and demonstration of the problem-solving process that organization of thought alone is worth buying the course.
Hamid Zia
Michael Huston
Great set of design questions, I recently finished 4 interview loops, all questions asked were discussed in this course!
Frank Visser
Sr. Software Engineer
Don’t Miss: How To Nail An Interview
Preparing For The Systems Design And Coding Interview
At Big Tech and high-growth startups, coding and systems design interviews are common – and fairly standard. A lot of people have asked me for preparation advice for these. Here is what I used when getting ready for an E5/E6 Facebook interview, and the one at Uber – where I was hired as a senior software engineer . It’s the same resources I recommend to people who are preparing for Big Tech or high-growth tech company interviews.
Note that none of the below links are affiliate links or sponsored. See my ethics statement on the lack of such links.
Engineers Love Learning With Educative
Onboarding plans in Educative has significantly streamlined our onboarding process. Giving new hires a checklist of classes and tasks makes it very convenient.”
–Engineering Manager at Bread
“A rich yet very easy-to-use platform. A wonderful team and a true opportunity to make a difference by sharing my skills – couldn’t have asked for better!”
–Samia Khalid, Senior AI Engineer at Microsoft
“An interactive and in-browser embedded coding environment, that’s just perfect. I believe this to be a very effective medium for learning a skill such as coding.”
–Ohan Emannuel, UI designer & Lead Front End Dev at Kudi.ai
“I spend my days and nights on Educative. It is indispensable. It is such a unique and reader-friendly site, resources available for learners on Educative is well organized and deep. It helps break down tricky programming concepts into simple chunks and exercises for practice to solidify the learning experience.”
–Souvik Kundu, Front End Dev
Join the 1M+ developers and engineering teams already growing with Educative.
Read Also: How To Cite An Interview
