Design a service that serves text-based commentary to a live Cricket Match. The commentary has to be a ball-by-ball which is written by a professional commentator and the service has to serve the commentary through the website to anyone who wants to read it.
The key elements in this design would be
- the flow of the data to give a great UX
- making design decisions for database, cache
- deciding on two workflows - one for reader and one for commentator
The problem statement is something to start with, be creative and dive into the product details and add constraints and features you think would be important.
- commentary will be updated by a professional commentator
- 5 million people would be reading the commentary at any given point in time
- the time to serve the commentary should be as low as possible
- make your high-level components operate with high availability
- ensure that the data in your system is durable, not matter what happens
- define how your system would behave while scaling-up and scaling-down
- make your system cost-effective and provide a justification for the same
- describe how capacity planning helped you made a good design decision
- think about how other services will interact with your service
- ensure the data in your system is never going in an inconsistent state
- ensure your system is free of deadlocks (if applicable)
- ensure that the throughput of your system is not affected by locking, if it does, state how it would affect
Create a design document of this system/feature stating all critical design decisions, tradeoffs, components, services, and communications. Also specify how your system handles at scale, and what will eventually become a chokepoint.
Do not create unnecessary components, just to make design look complicated. A good design is always simple and elegant. A good way to think about it is if you were to create a spearate process/machine/infra for each component and you will have to code it yourself, would you still do it?
To understand the nuances and internals of this system, build a prototype that
- implement the entire commentary workflow locally
This is a recommended tech-stack for building this prototype
| Which | Options |
|---|---|
| Language | Golang, Java, C++ |
| Database | MySQL |
| Cache | Redis |
These are the common pitfalls that you should keep in mind while you are building this prototype
- every resource you decide should be utilized very efficiently
- do not over engineer the solution
- making good database design and decisions
- getting optimal performance out of your architecture
- how not to over-engineer
If you find this assignment helpful, please
- share this assignment with your friends and peers
- star this repository and help it reach a wider audience
- give me a shoutout on Twitter @arpit_bhayani, or on LinkedIn at @arpitbhayani.
This assignment is part of Arpit's System Design Masterclass - A masterclass that helps you become great at designing scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available systems.