Design a Real-Time Logging System
Booking.comSoftware Engineer · Onsite
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This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, low-latency telemetry and logging systems, covering distributed systems architecture, ingestion pipelines, data modeling, real-time querying, reliability, backpressure, partitioning, indexing, retention, and operational trade-offs.
Design a logging/telemetry system for a large application platform.
Requirements:
- Many services send log or metric events to the system
- Event submission from producers can be asynchronous
- Users must be able to read/query the data in real time for debugging, monitoring, or dashboards
Discuss:
- APIs and data model
- High-level architecture for ingestion, storage, and querying
- How to handle high write throughput
- How to make recently ingested data available for real-time reads
- Reliability, fault tolerance, and backpressure
- Partitioning, indexing, retention, and scaling trade-offs
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