System design interview
Standard prompt structure: scope → APIs → storage → scale.
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Make it your own.
# System design: <feature>
## 1. Clarify
- Functional requirements
- Non-functional (latency, scale)
- Out-of-scope
## 2. Capacity
- QPS estimate
- Storage estimate
- Bandwidth
## 3. APIs
- Endpoints
- Request/response shape
## 4. Data model
- Entities
- Relationships
- Storage choice + reason
## 5. High-level architecture
- Clients
- Gateway
- Services
- Async/queues
- Caches
- DBs
## 6. Scale
- Read/write hotspots
- Sharding strategy
- Caching layers
## 7. Failure modes
- Region loss
- Hot key
- Cascading retry