How would you design a news feed system like Facebook's?

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System Design Interview Questions

  1. [JUNIOR] What is the CAP theorem and what are its implications in distributed systems?
  2. [JUNIOR] What is the difference between horizontal scaling and vertical scaling?
  3. [JUNIOR] What are the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases?
  4. [JUNIOR] What is caching and how does it enhance system performance?
  5. [JUNIOR] What is load balancing and why is it important in system design?
  6. [MID] What is the difference between eventual consistency and strong consistency?
  7. [SENIOR] How would you design a URL shortening service like TinyURL?
  8. [SENIOR] How would you design a chat service like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger?
  9. [SENIOR] How would you design a social media platform like Instagram or Twitter?
  10. [SENIOR] How would you design a video streaming service like YouTube or Netflix?
  11. [JUNIOR] What is latency and how does it differ from throughput?
  12. [JUNIOR] What is database sharding and when should it be implemented?
  13. [JUNIOR] What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and how does it work?
  14. [JUNIOR] What is a rate limiter and how does it work?
  15. [JUNIOR] What is the difference between monolithic and microservices architecture?
  16. [MID] How does consistent hashing work and what problem does it solve in distributed systems?
  17. [MID] How do load balancers distribute traffic and what algorithms do they use?
  18. [MID] What is the publish-subscribe messaging pattern and how does it decouple system components?
  19. [SENIOR] How would you design a ride-sharing service like Uber or Lyft?
  20. [SENIOR] How would you design an e-commerce platform like Amazon?
  21. [SENIOR] How would you design a file sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive?
  22. [SENIOR] How would you design a news feed system like Facebook's?
  23. [SENIOR] How would you design an API rate limiter for a large-scale service?
  24. [JUNIOR] What is high availability and how is it achieved in system design?
  25. [JUNIOR] What is the difference between a forward proxy and a reverse proxy?
  26. [JUNIOR] What is the difference between an API gateway and a load balancer?
  27. [JUNIOR] What do ACID properties guarantee in database transactions?
  28. [JUNIOR] What is RESTful API design and what are its key principles?
  29. [MID] What are the various cache eviction policies and when would you use each?
  30. [MID] What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication in distributed systems?
  31. [MID] What is data partitioning and replication and how do they relate?
  32. [MID] What is idempotency and why is it critical in distributed systems?
  33. [SENIOR] How would you design a distributed cache system?
  34. [SENIOR] How would you design a notification service?
  35. [SENIOR] How would you design a search engine or autocomplete service?
  36. [SENIOR] How would you design a recommendation system?
  37. [SENIOR] How would you design a distributed key-value store?
  38. [SENIOR] How would you design a payment system or payment gateway like Stripe?
  39. [SENIOR] How would you design a distributed message queue like Kafka?
  40. [SENIOR] How would you design a food delivery service like DoorDash?
  41. [EXPERT] How would you design a collaborative editing service like Google Docs?
  42. [JUNIOR] What is redundancy and why is it important in system reliability?
  43. [JUNIOR] What is the difference between database sharding and partitioning?
  44. [JUNIOR] How does Single Sign-On (SSO) work?
  45. [JUNIOR] What constitutes a single point of failure in system design?
  46. [MID] What is the difference between active-active and active-passive architectures?
  47. [MID] What are failover strategies and how do they contribute to system availability?
  48. [MID] What is the role of a message broker in event-driven architectures?
  49. [MID] What are the trade-offs between polling and streaming architectures?
  50. [MID] How does Apache Kafka work and why is it considered fast?
  51. [MID] What is OAuth 2.0 and how does it facilitate secure authorization?
  52. [SENIOR] How would you design an authentication and SSO platform?
  53. [SENIOR] How would you design a distributed job scheduler?
  54. [SENIOR] How would you design a location-based service like Yelp?
  55. [SENIOR] How would you design Airbnb?
  56. [SENIOR] How would you design a stock exchange system?
  57. [EXPERT] How would you design Google Maps?
  58. [EXPERT] How would you design a web crawler at scale?
  59. [EXPERT] How would you design a video conferencing system like Zoom?
  60. [EXPERT] What is stream processing and how does it differ from batch processing?
  61. [EXPERT] What is leader election and why is it necessary in distributed systems?
  62. [EXPERT] How would you design a distributed cloud storage system like S3?
  63. [JUNIOR] How does the request-response pattern work in HTTP?
  64. [MID] What is the difference between client-side caching and server-side caching?
  65. [MID] What is gRPC and how does it compare to REST?
  66. [MID] What are the differences between REST and GraphQL APIs?
  67. [MID] What is the concept of backpressure in system design?
  68. [MID] How do WebSockets enable real-time bidirectional communication?
  69. [MID] What are the differences between Kafka, ActiveMQ, and RabbitMQ?
  70. [MID] How does encryption at rest differ from encryption in transit?
  71. [MID] What is containerization and what are its benefits in system deployment?
  72. [MID] What is the difference between JWT, OAuth, and SAML for authentication?
  73. [SENIOR] How would you design a text storage service like Pastebin?
  74. [SENIOR] How would you design a flight booking system?
  75. [SENIOR] How would you design a parking lot system?
  76. [EXPERT] How would you design a distributed locking service?
  77. [EXPERT] How would you design a code deployment system?
  78. [EXPERT] What is event sourcing and how is it used in system design?
  79. [EXPERT] What is the concept of exactly-once processing semantics in distributed systems?
  80. [EXPERT] What is serverless architecture and what are its advantages and limitations?
  81. [EXPERT] How would you design an analytics platform for metrics and logging?
  82. [EXPERT] What are consensus algorithms and how are they used in distributed systems?
  83. [EXPERT] How would you design a ChatGPT-style AI service at scale?
  84. [EXPERT] What are the key design issues and trade-offs in distributed systems?
  85. [MID] What are webhooks and how are they used in system integrations?
  86. [MID] What is API versioning and why is it important for backward compatibility?
  87. [MID] What is the role of DNS caching in system performance?
  88. [MID] How do BASE properties differ from ACID in NoSQL systems?
  89. [EXPERT] How would you design a coordination system like ZooKeeper?
  90. [EXPERT] How would you design a scalable distributed storage system like Bigtable?
  91. [EXPERT] How would you design an online multiplayer game system?
  92. [EXPERT] What are collaborative filtering and content-based filtering in recommendation systems?
  93. [EXPERT] How would you solve the cold start problem in recommendation systems?
  94. [EXPERT] How would you design an online code editor?
  95. [EXPERT] What role do orchestration tools like Kubernetes play in managing distributed services?
  96. [EXPERT] What is windowing in real-time data processing?
  97. [EXPERT] How would you design a ticket booking system like BookMyShow?