Design a service that serves English Word Dictionary. The service exposes endpoints for getting the meaning given the word. The dictionary is weekly updated through a changelog which has the words and meanings that needs to be updated and this changelog will contain at max 1000 words. The total size of the dictionary is 1TB and it holds 171476 words.
Note: While building this service we are not allowed to use any traditional database like MySQl, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc. Be creative and use something different.
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.
- service should handle 5 million requests per minute
- dictionary is updated weekly through changelog
- you cannot use a traditional database, be creative here
- the service should be cost-efficient and "convenient"
- 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
- code your implementation locaclly and not worry about scale
This is a recommended tech-stack for building this prototype
| Which | Options |
|---|---|
| Language | Golang, Java, C++, Python |
These are the common pitfalls that you should keep in mind while you are building this prototype
- look at the number of words and total size of the dictionary
- designing storage formats
- data driven decisions
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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.