Skip to main content

System

A URL shortening system is one where you give some URL and it returns a shortened version of it! It's pretty straightforward, except the shortened URL typically needs to be kept alive for some period of time Altogether it's basically another layer in DNS

Functional requirements​

  • Availabile: We can always give a shortened URL, and anyone can find the shortened URL for their origin
  • *Consistent: We don't want multiple short URL's to point to different original URL's, but the actual level of consistency depends
  • Scalable: Same thing as always - in this case we'll choose higher consistency over higher availability, because let's say someone told us that's the design choice...we can design both ways

Non-functional requirements​

  • URLs should have only alphanumeric components
  • URLs should have a known maximum length, say 20 characters
  • We do not make choices around the actual websites it points to (could be nefarious websites)
  • There's a typical expiration time of the shortened URL, say a month, where after the client would need to re-register a URL for shorterning

Key actors​

  • Users will call this website to get a registered shortened URL for their input URL
  • Clients will call this website as a step in DNS resolution
    • shorturl.com --resolves--> superlongandtediousurl.com

Key components​

High-level architecture​

How these key components are connected with each other.