Designing Facebook’s News Feed: Mastering the System Design Interview
Designing Facebook’s News Feed: A Deep Dive
Designing the Facebook news feed is a classic system design interview question that tests a candidate’s understanding of various components of large-scale systems, such as databases, caches, distributed computing, and ranking algorithms. Here’s a simplified breakdown of designing the Facebook news feed:
Requirements and Goals
Start by clarifying the system’s requirements and objectives.
Architecting the High-Level Design
The design can be abstracted into different services and components:
Users & Content Storage: A robust database system is needed to store user profiles, their activities, and posts.
News Feed Generation Service: Dedicated to collating and preparing a user-specific feed.
Media Service: Manages multimedia content.
Ranking Service: Determines the relevance and order of posts.