Traffic Shaping and Rate Limiting at Scale

Issue #95: System Design Interview Roadmap

What You'll Master Today

Core Concepts

• Three production-grade rate limiting algorithms and when to use each

• Distributed coordination challenges and Redis-based solutions

• Performance trade-offs between accuracy and speed

Real-World Insights

• How Netflix protects against traffic spikes with multi-layer rate limiting

• Shopify's Black Friday strategy for handling 10x traffic increases

• Production failure patterns that break naive implementations

Hands-On Experience

• Build a complete distributed rate limiting system

• Test different algorithms under realistic load patterns

• Monitor real-time metrics and observe algorithm behaviors

Enterprise Patterns

• Memory-efficient sliding windows and token bucket optimization

• Clock synchronization issues in distributed systems

• Graceful degradation strategies when rate limiters fail