Code Room
System designHardsd-g648
Subject Dns traffic routing gatewayLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Networking & APIs interviewsIndustries Technology, Telecom

Question

Design a global authoritative DNS and traffic-routing system that steers users to the nearest healthy region for a service with 12 regions and 30M queries/sec at peak. It must support geo/latency-based routing, weighted records for gradual region rollout, and automatic failover that pulls a region out of rotation within tens of seconds of it going unhealthy. Constraints: authoritative-answer p99 under 5ms, resolver-side caching means you can't instantly redirect users, and a routing-config change must converge globally fast without serving stale/wrong answers. Walk through the architecture, the health/failover model, and the core trade-off.

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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