Medium e-commerce scalability
Design a Scalable Online Bookstore
Scenario
You are designing the backend architecture for an online bookstore that may receive 50,000 concurrent users during a major annual sale event. The bookstore sells physical and digital books, manages inventory, processes payments, and handles order fulfilment. During peak sale periods, response times must stay under 200ms for product browsing and under 2 seconds for checkout. The system must be resilient: a single server failure should not take the store offline. Background tasks like email notifications and inventory sync must never block user-facing requests.
Requirements
- 1Handle high traffic (50,000 concurrent users)
- 2Support horizontal scaling
- 3Database must not be publicly accessible
- 4Use caching for frequently accessed data
- 5Application should remain available if one server fails
- 6Background operations must not block user requests
Skills Assessed
ScalabilityReliabilitySystem DesignSecurity
Challenge Details
50,000
Concurrent users
10,000
Requests / second
15 min
Time limit
Time Limit
15 minutes
Required Components
load balancer
cache
database
app server