Critique a photo service sharded by the first letter of a name
I was asked this
No reports yet. Sign in to say where you were asked it.
A photo-sharing service lets users upload photos and share them by link. Its first design keeps photos on 26 servers, picking the server by the first letter of the user's name, so every user whose name starts with S lands on server 19.
What is wrong with this design? Talk through skew between letters, hot users, names that don't start with A to Z, renames, adding servers, and losing one. Propose a better placement scheme and how you would migrate to it without downtime. Then explain which parameters drive the cost of the metadata database, as distinct from photo storage and bandwidth.
No official answer yet. Draw yours on the right; publish it and it shows under Community.
Nothing published yet. Publish your canvas and it shows here for others to open and remix.