Design a URL shortener that serves billions of redirects per day with sub-10ms latency. Walk through key…

Question

Design a URL shortener that serves billions of redirects per day with sub-10ms latency. Walk through key generation, the read and write paths, and how you keep redirects fast as the dataset grows.

Prep Room · Answer

I'd anchor everything on the fact that this is wildly read-heavy, roughly 100 reads for every write, so I optimize the redirect path first and treat writes as…