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System design interview question

Design an API gateway

Medium · System design (HLD)

The prompt

"Design an API gateway. It sits in front of hundreds of backend services, handles authentication, rate limiting, routing, and observability, and every external request passes through it. 500,000 requests per second. Tell me what it does per request and how you keep it from becoming the bottleneck."

What this round really tests

a component on the critical path of everything, where every feature you add costs latency on every request and every bug is a total outage. The distinguishing content is: the per-request budget, which concerns belong in the gateway versus in services, and how configuration for hundreds of teams is managed without the gateway becoming a deployment bottleneck.

Clarifying questions worth asking

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