Problem Statement
Design a high-throughput ad exchange capable of processing approximately 175,000 bid requests per second.
The platform acts as an intermediary between publishers, who send impression opportunities, and demand-side bidders, who respond with bids. The system must fulfill the following core functions:
- Bid Request Handling: Efficiently receive and validate incoming bid requests.
- Data Enrichment: Augment bid requests with relevant user, device, and contextual data.
- Campaign/Bidder Identification: Determine eligible internal campaigns or external bidders for a given impression opportunity.
- Real-time Auction: Execute an auction process under a strict latency budget to select the winning bid.
- Ad Delivery: Return the winning ad creative to the publisher.
- Constraint Enforcement: Implement mechanisms to enforce pacing, budget limits, and frequency caps for campaigns.
- Event Logging: Log all critical events, including impressions, clicks, and billing events, for analytics, reporting, and financial reconciliation.
Candidates should discuss the proposed API shape, core architectural components, storage choices, data partitioning strategies, fault tolerance mechanisms, and the key consistency and latency trade-offs inherent in such a system.
AI interview prep
Core dilemma
Balancing ultra-low latency (for real-time bidding and ad delivery) with extreme write throughput (175k QPS), while maintaining strict financial consistency for billing and budget enforcement, and handling complex real-time data enrichment and decision-making.
3 tradeoffs and 3 stress tests locked
Interview prep
Unlock the interviewer X-Ray rubric, tradeoff matrix, stress tests, clarifying questions, and key concepts.
Problem Statement
Design a high-throughput ad exchange capable of processing approximately 175,000 bid requests per second.
The platform acts as an intermediary between publishers, who send impression opportunities, and demand-side bidders, who respond with bids. The system must fulfill the following core functions:
- Bid Request Handling: Efficiently receive and validate incoming bid requests.
- Data Enrichment: Augment bid requests with relevant user, device, and contextual data.
- Campaign/Bidder Identification: Determine eligible internal campaigns or external bidders for a given impression opportunity.
- Real-time Auction: Execute an auction process under a strict latency budget to select the winning bid.
- Ad Delivery: Return the winning ad creative to the publisher.
- Constraint Enforcement: Implement mechanisms to enforce pacing, budget limits, and frequency caps for campaigns.
- Event Logging: Log all critical events, including impressions, clicks, and billing events, for analytics, reporting, and financial reconciliation.
Candidates should discuss the proposed API shape, core architectural components, storage choices, data partitioning strategies, fault tolerance mechanisms, and the key consistency and latency trade-offs inherent in such a system.