Acing the System Design Interview

8 Design a rate-limiting service

This chapter covers

• Using rate limiting
• Discussing a rate-limiting service
• Understanding various rate-limiting algorithms

Rate limiting is a common service that we should almost always mention during a system design interview and is mentioned in most of the example questions in this book. This chapter aims to address situations where 1) the interviewer may ask for more details when we mention rate limiting during an interview, and 2) the question itself is to design a rate-limiting service.

Rate limiting defines the rate at which consumers can make requests to API endpoints. Rate limiting prevents inadvertent or malicious overuse by clients, especially bots. In this chapter, we refer to such clients as “excessive ...