Design multi-tenant ingestion and processing platform
Company: Amazon
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
## System Design Prompt
Design a **multi-tenant data ingestion + processing platform** used by **thousands of internal teams**.
### Requirements
- Multi-tenant: each team has:
- different **schemas** and data formats,
- different **SLAs** (latency, freshness, availability),
- different throughput and burst patterns.
- Must be **cost-controlled** (avoid runaway spend; support chargeback/showback).
- Must address:
- tenant **isolation strategy** (hard vs. soft isolation),
- **noisy neighbor** prevention,
- separation of **control plane vs. data plane**,
- guardrails so the org can’t “use the system badly” over time.
### Deliverables
Describe the architecture, tenancy model, scaling, reliability, and operational mechanisms.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect scalable, multi-tenant data ingestion and processing platforms, assessing competencies in tenancy modeling, tenant isolation strategies, SLA-driven design, cost-control and chargeback mechanisms, noisy-neighbor mitigation, and operational reliability.
