URL Shortener diagram template

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About this design

A URL shortener looks trivial until the traffic numbers arrive: redirects outnumber creations by a hundred to one, so the whole design bends toward fast reads. This template puts a CDN and a Redis cache in front of the link database so a hot short code never touches disk. Creation goes through a separate key generation service that hands out unique, non-guessable codes ahead of time, which avoids both collisions and a write-time lookup. Clicks are not recorded inline; the app emits them to a Kafka topic and an analytics worker aggregates them into a warehouse, so a slow report can never slow a redirect. Use it to discuss base62 versus hashing, expiry, custom aliases and abuse handling. The weak spot is the key service: it needs its own replication story, because every create depends on it.

Diagram as text

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title "URL shortener"
direction LR
user "Visitors" -> cdn cloudfront "CDN" -> lb nginx "Load balancer" -> service app "Shortener API"
[app x3]
app -> cache redis "Hot links"
app -> db postgres "Links DB"
app -> service keygen "Key generator"
app -[click event]-> topic kafka "Click events" -> worker stats "Analytics" -> warehouse snowflake "Click warehouse"