Design a Flash Sale System
Hard · System Design · about 45 minutes
Asked at Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Instacart, ByteDance, Walmart Global Tech, Wayfair, Shopee, Flipkart, Zalando.
Design a flash sale for a limited drop: 10,000 units of a product go on sale at a fixed time and ~1M shoppers arrive within seconds, sending 100k+ buy requests per second. Never oversell, give shoppers a fast and honest answer, keep bots from taking everything, and keep the rest of the store running.