Design a URL shortener
Company: J.P. Morgan
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a URL shortening service similar to Bitly. The service should accept a long URL and return a short alias, and visiting the short URL should redirect users to the original URL. Discuss the API design, data model, short-code generation strategy, scalability, caching, reliability, abuse prevention, and key trade-offs.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates the ability to design scalable, reliable web services and distributed-system components, with emphasis on API design, data modeling, short-code generation strategies, caching, reliability, abuse prevention, and trade-off analysis.