System Design · ByteDance · Medium
Design a ticket booking system of the flash-sale kind, where a large crowd races to grab a limited supply of tickets. The interviewer concentrates on two central problems. 1. A sudden surge of traffic The moment tickets open for sale, a very large number of users send requests at once. Discuss load balancing, a queue or waiting room, and rate limiting. Explain how you would stop the burst from hitting the backend services and the database directly and bringing them down. 2.…