How would you approach designing a system that requires high availability and low latency? What strategies would you employ?

During my final year project, I worked on a campus event management system. We needed to ensure that students could access event information quickly and that the system remained operational during high-traffic periods, such as event registration. To achieve high availability, we implemented a load balancer that distributed requests across multiple servers. This ensured that no single server would become a bottleneck. Additionally, we utilized caching to store frequently accessed data, which reduced latency. By monitoring server performance and user access patterns, we could adjust our resources dynamically, ensuring a smooth user experience even during peak times.

While volunteering for a charity, I helped design a website for a fundraiser that needed to handle donations efficiently. Knowing that high traffic could occur during the event, we set up a cloud-based solution that allowed us to scale resources based on demand. We also implemented a content delivery network (CDN) to improve load times for users accessing the site from various locations. Additionally, we chose a reliable payment processing service that guaranteed uptime, ensuring that users could donate without issues. The event was a success, and we received feedback praising the ease of use of the website.

In my first job, I was part of a team tasked with designing a customer support chat system. Our primary goal was to ensure that users had instant access to support while keeping the system operational during busy hours. To achieve this, we implemented a microservices architecture that allowed different components to scale independently. We also utilized a message queue to handle incoming requests efficiently, ensuring that users received quick responses without overwhelming our servers. Additionally, we set up redundancy by deploying the system across multiple data centers, which helped maintain high availability even if one location faced issues. This experience taught me the importance of planning for both high availability and low latency in system design.