SYSTEM DESIGNDesign a Recommendation EngineNetflixSpotifyAmazon
TRAFFIC LEVEL
—/3
CONSTRAINTS
Users100M
Items10M
User interaction events/day5B
Recommendation latency< 50ms
Update cadenceWithin 24 hours of activity
Compute & Network
Load BalancerDistribute traffic
API GatewayEntry point / auth
API ServerBusiness logic
Worker NodeAsync processing
CDN EdgeGlobal cache
WebSocket GatewayPersistent connections
Data Stores
PostgreSQLRelational DB
MySQLRelational DB
CassandraWide-Column DB
DynamoDBNoSQL / Managed
S3 BucketObject storage
Queues & Cache
Redis CacheIn-memory store
KafkaEvent stream
ZookeeperCoordination
Specialized
Bloom FilterProbabilistic set
Rate LimiterThrottling
Geohash ServiceGeospatial index
Trie ServerPrefix search
APNS / FCMPush notifications
AggregatorBatch / roll-up
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🚨 INCIDENT
NetflixSpotifyAmazon

Design a recommendation engine for a streaming platform. Recommend the top-10 most relevant items (movies, songs, products) for each user. Recommendations must update within 24 hours of new user activity. Handle 100M users, 10M items, real-time event tracking, and a/b testing of recommendation algorithms.

📥 Assigned to:You — Senior Engineer
SCALE LEVELS
1
100,000 RPS
Target: <50ms
2
1,000,000 RPS
Target: <30ms
3
10,000,000 RPS
Target: <20ms
GLOBAL SUCCESS RATE
100.0%
P99 LATENCY
45ms
Target: < 200ms
TOTAL RPS INGESTED0 / 11,000
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