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System Design: Traffic Spike

HardSystem Design00:00
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Your question is System Design: Traffic Spike. Take a moment with it on the right.

Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).

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Problem

Explain how you would design a system that can handle a 10x spike in traffic during a seasonal event.

Clarify the workload, traffic shape, latency and availability objectives, and whether machine learning inference is on the critical path. Describe the end-to-end architecture, capacity strategy, online and batch components, observability, evaluation, and failure recovery. Address how you would validate the design before the event and safely scale it back afterward.