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System design

Microsoft system design

6 system design prompts sourced from real Microsoft loops. Each one ships with scale targets, evaluation rubrics, and a reference architecture diagram.

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Design a URL shortener (TinyURL)

Design a service that takes a long URL and returns a short alias. Must support billions of redirects per day with low latency, predictable IDs, and analytics on click-through.

Scale targets

Users: 500M MAUQPS: 100k reads / 10k writesLatency: <50ms p99 redirectStorage: ~1TB / year of links

Key areas

Hash vs counter-based ID generationRead-heavy cachingAnalytics pipelineCustom alias collisionsAbuse + spam detection

Reference diagram

Read-only — use it after attempting the prompt yourself.