System Design: Building a Scalable URL Shortener from Requirements to Base62 Keys
This article walks through a system design interview for a URL shortener, covering requirements analysis, capacity estimation (20K read QPS, 15TB storage), API design, NoSQL data modeling, key generation via auto-increment ID with base62 encoding, hash-based partitioning, Redis caching with LRU eviction, load balancing strategies, and lazy expiration cleanup.
