Code Room
System designHardsd-g510
Subject Fan outLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design ordered fan-out to millions of subscribers with per-key ordering. A single source emits updates keyed by entity (e.g. document edits, account-balance events); each update must reach every subscriber of that key, and every subscriber must observe updates for a given key in the exact order they were produced — even though one key may have 5M subscribers and updates arrive at 100K/sec. A few hot keys dominate traffic.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.