System Design on AWS

Chapter 12. Designing a URL Shortener Service

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We explored the concept of DNS in Chapter 9, noting that it’s easier to remember a website’s URL than their IP addresses—but what about the long URLs? It’s easy to remember the root part of the URL (for example, learning.oreilly.com in https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-system-design/9781098146887/) but you can easily forget the long URL. We often tend to embed links to text because that increases the readability. Another way of sharing long URLs is by shortening them to shorter URLs. For example, LinkedIn automatically shortens any URL that is part of a post because it helps in increasing post readability and user interaction. In microblogging applications such as Twitter (now known as X), there is a limit on characters for a single post , so to reduce the length of your text, you can shorten the URL via some URL shortener service such as tinyurl or bitly and attach ...