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.

Database Considerations