Learning Objectives & Key Takeaways
0 / 4 Completed- Understand System Design core architecture and runtime execution model
- Audit real-world latency, throughput benchmarks, and memory footprint
- Implement zero-downtime deployment patterns with resilience guards
- Verify code snippets and architect blueprints against production SLOs
- Cloud CDN hits bypass your origin entirely, which is the only way to survive billion-scale redirect traffic.
- The cache key, not the full URL, decides whether Cloud CDN serves a hit or forwards to your backend.
- Choosing 301 over 308 silently changes whether browsers cache redirects forever on their own.
- Negative caching lets you cache redirect responses themselves, not just final destinations.
- Hot keys like viral short links still need origin protection even with CDN in front.
The Morning the Short Links Took Down Production
It was a Tuesday morning when the on call engineer got paged because p99 latency on redirect requests had jumped from 20 milliseconds to 4 seconds. The culprit was not a bug in the code, it was success. A marketing campaign using the company's shortened links had gone viral overnight, and every single redirect request was hitting the origin database directly.
The team had built a perfectly reasonable URL shortener for a startup serving a few thousand redirects a day. They had a load balancer, an application server, and a Postgres table mapping short codes to destination URLs. Nobody had designed for a billion redirects a day, and nobody had planned for what happens when every request bypasses caching entirely.
- Why Most of Your Traffic Should Never Reach Your Database
- Designing the Cache Key Correctly
- Choosing the Right Redirect Status Code
- Configuring Cloud CDN for Redirect Traffic
- Protecting the Origin When a Link Goes Viral
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