Design a URL Shortener
Design a URL-shortening service like bit.ly: generating short codes, storing mappings, and redirecting with low latency. Cover capacity estimation, the read/write ratio, hot links, and how you would add per-link analytics without slowing down redirects.
Hints
Hint 1
Base62 over an auto-incrementing id is simple — think about what it leaks and when you need random codes instead.
Hint 2
Redirects are overwhelmingly read-heavy. Work out where caches and CDNs fit before sharding anything.
Asked at
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