System Design
Problem statement : Suppose the data is produced by different upstream services, which
publish messages to an event broker.
Management would like you to design a system to enable all employees within the company to
use the data for insights and dashboards (Business Intelligence). Please make reasonable
assumptions if necessary to answer the following questions:
a) How would you approach this challenge with your team?
Below are various steps or approaches which should be taken while developing a solution for
above scenario :
1. Requirement Gathering: Understand the business requirements, the nature of the data,
and the key metrics and insights that the employees are interested in. This would involve
meetings with stakeholders and potential users of the system.
2. Data Source Analysis: Evaluate the reliability, data availability, data format, and data
quality of the upstream services. Understand that source systems are often outside our
control and can become unresponsive or provide poor-quality data.
3. Design Data Architecture: Design a scalable and robust data architecture that can
handle data ingestion, processing, storage, and visualization. This would involve
choosing the right technologies and tools for each stage of the data pipeline. The design
should reflect current and future data needs and strategy based on changing
requirements.
4. Data Governance and Security: Define and implement data governance policies to
ensure data quality, consistency, and reliability. Also, ensure that the data is handled in a
secure and compliant manner, respecting privacy laws and regulations.
5. Data Transformation: Define and implement a transformation solution that involves
changing data from its original form into something useful for downstream use cases like
analytics, machine learning, or reports. This stage involves decisions on data model and
data pipeline architecture.
6. Proof of Concept: Develop a proof of concept to validate the feasibility of the solution.
This would involve building a minimal version of the system and testing it with a small
amount of data.
7. Data Delivery: Deliver processed data to consumers like the analytics team, machine
learning team, etc. This involves designing efficient data pipelines that ensure data is
delivered in a timely and reliable manner.
8. Data Operations: Incorporate practices like automated deployment, monitoring,
observability, and incident reporting into the data engineering process. This aims to
improve the release and quality of data products.
9. Iterative Development and Testing: Follow an iterative development approach,
gradually building and refining the system based on feedback and testing. This would
involve adding new features, improving performance, or enhancing data security and
governance. Regular reviews and adjustments to the system are necessary to ensure it
continues to meet the needs of the users and the business.
b) Which data stack architecture would you choose? Please design an
architecture diagram that you present to us in detail in the technical interview.
The decision of technology can vary according to specific use cases, the volume and velocity of
data, the existing technology stack, the skill set of the team, and the budget.
Below are some of the suggested tech stack but it can vary widely as data engineering domain
today has a problem of plenty :
1. Data Ingestion - Apache Kafka: Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform
that can handle high volume real-time data efficiently. It’s designed to handle data
streams from multiple sources and deliver them to multiple consumers. This makes
Kafka an excellent choice for ingesting data from various upstream services in real-time.
Kafka also provides strong durability and fault-tolerance guarantees, ensuring that data
is reliably collected and processed.
Managed Alternative : Instead of Apache Kafka, we could use managed services
like Amazon Kinesis or Google Pub/Sub. These services are fully managed,
scalable, and reliable, making it easy to ingest, process, and analyze real-time,
streaming data.
2. Data Processing - Apache Spark: Apache Spark is a fast, in-memory data processing
engine with elegant and expressive development APIs to allow data workers to efficiently
execute streaming, machine learning or SQL workloads that require fast iterative access
to datasets. Spark’s in-memory primitives provide performance up to 100 times faster for
certain applications by allowing user programs to load data into a cluster’s memory and
query it repeatedly, Spark is well-suited for processing and generating insights from large
datasets.
Managed Alternative : Instead of Apache Spark, we could use Amazon EMR.
Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast,
and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable
Amazon EC2 instances.
3. Data Storage - Apache Cassandra: Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable and
high-performance distributed database system, making it a great choice for storing
real-time processing results. Cassandra’s distributed architecture makes it highly
resilient, with no single point of failure, and it can handle large amounts of data across
many commodity servers.
Managed Alternative : Instead of Apache Cassandra, we could use Amazon S3
and Google Cloud Storage for distributed file storage, and Google Cloud Bigtable
or Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL databases. These services are fully managed,
ensuring we can store and retrieve any amount of data at any time.
4. Data Warehouse - Google BigQuery or Amazon Redshift: Both Google BigQuery and
Amazon Redshift are fully-managed, petabyte-scale, and cost-effective cloud data
warehouse solutions that use SQL and are integrated with various BI tools. They are
designed to let you analyze large datasets and generate insights using SQL queries.
They also support structured and semi-structured data types, including JSON, Avro, and
CSV, which makes them flexible for different data formats.
Alternative : Snowflake is primarily known as a data warehousing solution. It
provides a centralized platform where all our data can be consolidated for
analytics and business intelligence. It’s designed to be easy to use, with a
SQL-based interface and a range of features to optimize performance, manage
data, and secure our information. This makes it a good alternative to Google
BigQuery or Amazon Redshift.
5. Data Visualization - Tableau or PowerBI: Both Tableau and PowerBI are powerful data
visualization tools that can connect to a wide variety of data sources, including BigQuery,
snowflake and Redshift. They provide intuitive and interactive dashboards and reports,
making it easier for all employees within the company to use the data for insights. They
also support a wide range of data visualization types, from simple bar charts and line
graphs to more complex heat maps and geospatial visualizations.
The above architecture leverages the strengths of each component to create a robust, scalable,
and efficient data stack that can handle both real-time and batch processing, store large
amounts of data reliably, and provide powerful tools for data analysis and visualization.
c) What technical and organizational challenges might you need to overcome
during implementation of the project?
Below are some of the challenges or issues which generally needs to be encountered in an data
engineering project
1. Data Ingestion and Collection:
○ Challenge: Efficiently collecting data from various upstream services can be
complex. These services might produce data in different formats, frequencies,
and volumes.
○ Solution: Implement a robust data ingestion pipeline that can handle different
data sources. Use tools like Apache Kafka or AWS Kinesis for event streaming.
Normalize data formats and ensure reliable delivery.
2. Scalability and Performance:
○ Challenge: As the company grows, the system must handle increasing data
volumes without compromising performance.
○ Solution: Design horizontally scalable components. Use distributed databases,
caching layers, and load balancers. Optimize queries for dashboards to avoid
bottlenecks.
3. Data Transformation and ETL:
○ Challenge: Raw data needs transformation (ETL) before it’s usable for BI. This
process can be resource-intensive.
○ Solution: Design an ETL pipeline to transform, clean, and aggregate data. Use
tools like Apache Spark or AWS Glue. Monitor ETL jobs for efficiency.
4. Data Security and Access Control:
○ Challenge: Ensuring data privacy, access control, and compliance with
regulations.
○ Solution: Implement role-based access control (RBAC), encryption, and audit
logs.
5. Data Ownership and Accountability:
○ Challenge: Determining who owns the data, who is responsible for its accuracy,
and who can make decisions regarding its use.
○ Solution:
i. Define clear data ownership roles within the organization. Assign data
stewards or custodians for each dataset.
ii. Establish data governance policies that outline responsibilities, access
rights, and data quality standards.
iii. Implement data lineage tracking to understand data flow and ownership
across systems.
iv. Regularly audit data access and usage to ensure compliance with
policies.
6. Data Quality and Consistency:
○ Challenge: Data from different sources may have inconsistencies, missing
values, or errors.
○ Solution: Implement data validation checks, data profiling, and data quality
monitoring. Address data anomalies promptly.
7. Real-time vs. Batch Processing:
○ Challenge: Balancing real-time insights with batch processing requirements.
○ Solution: Use a hybrid approach. Real-time for critical dashboards, batch for
historical analysis.
8. Infrastructure and Cloud Considerations:
○ Challenge: Choosing the right infrastructure (on-premises vs. cloud) and
managing costs.
○ Solution: Evaluate cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) based on scalability,
cost, and managed services. Consider serverless options.
9. Data Governance and Metadata Management:
○ Challenge: Tracking data lineage, metadata, and versioning.
○ Solution: Implement a data catalog, document data flows, and maintain
metadata. Ensure compliance with data governance policies.
10. Change Management and Adoption:
○ Challenge: Employees need to adopt the new system.
○ Solution: Provide training, documentation, and support. Involve stakeholders
early in the design process.
11. Monitoring and Alerting:
○ Challenge: Detecting issues, bottlenecks, and anomalies.
○ Solution: Set up monitoring for data pipelines, dashboards, and system health.
Implement alerts for failures or performance degradation.
12. Scalable Dashboard Design:
○ Challenge: Designing dashboards that scale as more users access them.
○ Solution: Use caching, optimize queries, and consider pre-aggregations. Choose
a BI tool that supports scalability.
13. Data Retention and Archiving:
○ Challenge: Managing historical data storage and retention policies.
○ Solution: Define data retention periods. Archive older data to cost-effective
storage solutions.
