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Scaling Systems and Platforms Through Growth Questions

Describe experiences scaling systems, platforms, or services through significant growth phases. Examples: scaling from 1 million to 100 million users, migrating from monolith to microservices as organization grew, or building infrastructure to support 10x team growth. For each example: What was working before that stopped working at scale? What bottlenecks did you encounter? How did you identify and address them? What architectural changes were necessary? How did you sequence the work to minimize disruption? What did you learn? Discuss both technical and organizational scaling—they're intertwined.

MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a high-level architecture to scale a consumer web product from 1 million monthly users to 100 million users over two years. Requirements: peak concurrent users = 2% of total users, target tail-latency p99 < 300ms for API endpoints, multi-region for NA+EU, 99.95% availability. Provide components, data flow, and a migration sequencing plan that minimizes customer disruption.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a global message processing platform to handle 1,000,000 messages per second with at-least-once delivery guarantees, application-level exactly-once processing semantics, and ordering per key. Describe components, partitioning strategy, deduplication approach, and how to scale both producers and consumers safely.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a service onboarding and governance process for a platform with hundreds of internal services and teams, ensuring each service adheres to architecture patterns, observability standards, SLOs, and security requirements without slowing developer velocity. Describe automation, review checkpoints, and incentives.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a cross-region failover plan for an authentication service to tolerate a complete region outage without visible login failures. Address token issuance, session validation, key management, replication, and split-brain prevention.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design a safe experiment and test plan to prove a scaling claim up to target traffic (e.g., 100k RPS) to a skeptical CTO. Include load test design, environment isolation, chaos engineering checks, SLO-based success criteria, and precautions to avoid damaging production systems.

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