API Design for Twitter System Design

A basic API design for our services:

8.1 Post a Tweets:

This API will allow the user to post a tweet on the platform.

postTweet
{
  userID: UUID, 
  content: string,
  mediaURL?: string
}
  • User ID (UUID): ID of the user.
  • Content (string): Contents of the tweet.
  • Media URL (string): URL of the attached media (optional).
  • Result (boolean): Represents whether the operation was successful or not.

8.2 Follow or unfollow a user

This API will allow the user to follow or unfollow another user.

Follow
{
  followerID: UUID, 
  followeeID: UUID
}
Unfollow
{
  followerID: UUID, 
  followeeID: UUID
}

Parameters

  • Follower ID (UUID): ID of the current user.
  • Followee ID (UUID): ID of the user we want to follow or unfollow.
  • Media URL (string): URL of the attached media (optional).
  • Result (boolean): Represents whether the operation was successful or not.

8.3 Get NewsFeed

This API will return all the tweets to be shown within a given newsfeed.

getNewsfeed
{
  userID: UUID
}

Parameters

  • User ID (UUID): ID of the user.
  • Tweets (Tweet[]): All the tweets to be shown within a given newsfeed.

Designing Twitter – A System Design Interview Question

Designing Twitter (or Facebook feed or Facebook search..) is a quite common question that interviewers ask candidates. A lot of candidates get afraid of this round more than the coding round because they don’t get an idea of what topics and tradeoffs they should cover within this limited timeframe.

Important Topics for Designing Twitter

  • How Would You Design Twitter?
  • Requirements for Twitter System Design
  • Capacity Estimation for Twitter System Design
  • Use Case Design for Twitter System Design
  • Low Level Design for Twitter System Design
  • High Level Design for Twitter System Design
  • Data Model Design for Twitter System Design
  • API Design for Twitter System Design
  • Microservices Used for Twitter System Design
  • Scalability for Twitter System Design

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1. How Would You Design Twitter?

Don’t jump into the technical details immediately when you are asked this question in your interviews. Do not run in one direction, it will just create confusion between you and the interviewer. Most of the candidates make mistakes here and immediately they start listing out some bunch of tools or frameworks like MongoDB, Bootstrap, MapReduce, etc....

2. Requirements for Twitter System Design

2.1 Functional Requirements:...

3. Capacity Estimation for Twitter System Design

To estimate the system’s capacity, we need to analyze the expected daily click rate....

4. Use Case Design for Twitter System Design

...

5. Low Level Design for Twitter System Design

A low-level design of Twitter dives into the details of individual components and functionalities. Here’s a breakdown of some key aspects:...

6. High Level Design for Twitter System Design

We will discuss about high level design for twitter,...

7. Data Model Design for Twitter System Design

This is the general Dara model which reflects our requirements....

8. API Design for Twitter System Design

A basic API design for our services:...

9. Microservices Used for Twitter System Design

9.1 Data Partitioning...

10. Scalability for Twitter System Design

Let us identify and resolve Scalability such as single points of failure in our design:...

11. Conclusion

Twitter handles thousands of tweets per second so you can’t have just one big system or table to handle all the data so it should be handled through a distributed approach. Twitter uses the strategy of scatter and gather where it set up multiple servers or data centers that allow indexing. When Twitter gets a query (let’s say #geeksforgeeks) it sends the query to all the servers or data centers and it queries every Early Bird shard. All the early bird that matches with the query return the result. The results are returned, sorted, merged, and reranked. The ranking is done based on the number of retweets, replies, and the popularity of the tweets....