TinyURL System Design

System Architecture

We will have a UI that takes a long URL as an input, calls a short URL service which will somehow generate a short URL and store it in a database and then also returns the short URL. Similarly it can also be used to fetch the longer URL for a short URL. In this case, the short URL service will fetch the long URL from the database and redirect the user to the longer URL

But more importantly, how is this short URL generated?

Even though we have 62 characters, let us assume that we are generating numbers instead of URLs, for ease of understanding. So when we say unique URL, for the scope of this article we mean a unique number. We can safely assume we will be running multiple instances of this short URL service, say SUS1, SUS2, SUS3, etc. Now there is a possibility that more than one of them will end up generating the same number, which means one short URL will now point to two long URLs, which cannot happen. This is known as a collision in computer science.

One way to avoid this would be to check in the database before storing the short URL, to ensure that it doesn’t already exist and retry if it does. But this is a very poor solution. A better solution would be to use a Redis. This Redis will basically start counting from 1 and keep incrementing the count for each request before responding back. With this unique number, we can generate a unique URL by converting it to base 62. This is a very simple way to avoid collisions, but there will be a few challenges with this system.

First of all, every machine will be interacting with Redis, which will increase the load on Redis. Also, the Redis here becomes a single point of failure, which is a big NO! If Redis goes down we will have no way to recover. Another issue is if the load becomes more than what our Redis can handle, it will slow down the whole system.

What if we use multiple instances of Redis? This will give us better performance and higher availability! Until both systems start generating duplicates. We can avoid this by assigning a series to each Redis, but what happens when we want to add another Redis? In this case, we need a managing element to keep track of which Redis has which series. Since we are introducing a managing component, we might as well look into alternatives for Redis.

So let’s look into some solutions that don’t require a Redis.

Our requirement is to ensure our short URL service is generating unique numbers such that even different instances of the service cannot return the same number. That way each service generates a unique number converts it to base 62 and returns it. The simplest way to implement it would be to set a range for each service, and to make sure each service has a different range we will use something called Token Service, while will be the managing component in our system. The token service will run on a single-threaded model and cater to only one machine at a time so that each machine has a different range. Our services will only interact with this token service on startup and when they are about to run out of their range, so token service can be something simple like a MySQL service as it will be dealing with a very minimal load. We will of course make sure that this MySQL service is distributed across geographies to reduce latency and also to make sure it is not a single point of failure.

Let’s look at an example. Say we have 3 short URL services, SUS1, SUS2, SUS3. On startup say SUS1 has range 1-1000, SUS2 has range 1001-2000 and SUS3 has range 2001-3000. When SUS1 runs out of its range token service will make sure it gets a range that hasn’t been assigned to another machine. One way to ensure this would be to maintain these ranges as records and keeping an “assigned” flag against them. When a range is assigned to a service, the “assigned” flag can be set to true. There could be other ways to do it, this is just one approach that can be followed.

How do we scale it?

Now we mentioned using a MySQL service that handles a very low load. But what if our system gets bombarded with requests? Well, we can either spin up multiple instances of the MySQL instances and distribute them across the map, as mentioned previously, or we could simply increase the length of our range. That would mean that machines will approach the token service at a much lower frequency.

Missing Ranges

So we now have a solution that gives us unique numbers, is distributed around the world to reduce latency, and doesn’t have a single point of failure. But what if one of the services that haven’t used up the complete range shuts down? How will we track what part of its range was left unused? We won’t! Tracking these missing ranges will add a level of complexity to our solution. Now, remember that we have more than 3.5 trillion possible unique numbers, which is a huge amount compared to the few thousand unique numbers that we are losing. A few thousand numbers are not significant enough to complicate our system and possibly compromise the performance. So we will just let them go and when the service starts back up we will assign it a new range.

How will we redirect a short URL to the longer URL?

When a request comes for a short URL to be redirected to the longer URL, we will fetch the long URL from the database, the service does a redirect and the user ends up on the right page. Now if you look back at the diagram, we have used Cassandra as our database. We could have used any database that has the capability to support 3.5 trillion data points, it can also be done with a MySQL database with a little bit of sharding. It is just more easily possible with Cassandra so that is what we used, but you can go with any other alternative that you find more convenient. We have discussed more database solutions for various scenarios in this article, you can check it out for a detailed explanation.

Where is the analytics element here?

Now let’s try to improve this system a bit. Because we can extract a lot of data that can later be used for making business decisions, let us try to add an analytics component to our system. Every time we get a request to generate a short URL, we will get some attributes along with it, like which platform it is using - could be something like Facebook or Twitter, which user agent it is coming from - iOS, Android, web browser, etc, we will also get the IP address of the sender. These attributes can give us a lot of information like which companies are using our system - these are our clients, which part of the world most requests are coming from - we can keep an instance of the token service there to reduce latency, etc. So when we get a request, instead of straight away responding back with the longer URL, we will first save this information into a Kafka which can be used to power the analytics. But this adds an additional step in our process and that increases the latency. So instead of doing this in a sequential manner, we can make this write to Kafka an asynchronous parallel operation running on a separate thread.

The only challenge here is that if for some reason the write operation fails, we don’t have that data anymore and it will be lost. But since it is not very critical information, just most basic information about the users, losing out on some of this data will not be a huge loss.

Optimize Optimize Optimize

Ok, so we also have analytics built into our system now. Can we still optimize it further? Well, remember those Kafka-writes after every request? We don’t necessarily need to do them so often. Instead of sending out these events to Kafka with every request, we could maintain this information in a local data structure like with a threshold size, queue for example, and when the data structure is about to overflow we can do a bulk write to Kafka and empty the queue. Or we could also make it a scheduled operation, for example, do a bulk write after every 30 seconds and empty the queue. Since CPU and bandwidth utilization are reduced we can drive more performance from the machine helping with low latency and high availability. Again this will be an asynchronous operation, and the drawback with maintaining the data locally is that if the machine unexpectedly shuts down and the write operation fails we will lose more information than we were losing on single writes, but you can discuss these trade-offs with your interviewer to come up with a solution that best suits your requirements.

That should be it for a URL shortening service system design! Send us your thoughts on our youtube video!