How would you approach the design of a system that needs to handle sudden spikes in traffic, such as during a product launch?

During my final year, I worked on a college project that involved designing an online ticketing system for a campus event. We anticipated a surge in users right when the tickets went on sale. To manage this, we decided to implement a load balancer to distribute incoming requests across multiple servers. We also used a caching mechanism to store frequently requested data, which significantly reduced the load on our database. As a result, when the ticket sales launched, the system handled the traffic smoothly, and we received positive feedback from users about the seamless experience.

While volunteering for a local charity, I helped design a website for a fundraising campaign that included a live donation feature. Knowing we would have many visitors during the initial launch, I proposed using a cloud service that offered automatic scaling. This way, as traffic increased, the system could allocate more resources without manual intervention. Additionally, we employed a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure that images and static content loaded quickly, which kept users engaged and encouraged more donations. This approach resulted in a successful campaign that exceeded our fundraising goals.

In my first job at an e-commerce platform, we often faced traffic spikes during holiday sales. To address this, I collaborated with the engineering team to enhance our system architecture. We introduced microservices to break down our application into smaller, manageable components, each capable of scaling independently. We also implemented a robust monitoring system to track performance metrics in real-time, allowing us to respond quickly to any issues. This not only improved our site's performance during peak times but also increased our overall uptime, leading to higher customer satisfaction.