The Summarization Problem

Here is another example problem from a system design interview. Like with The Twitter Problem, we will start with a statement and then go through things like clarifying questions, designing the software architecture and resolve any issues that it may have.

Statement

Imagine you are at a tech interview and you are asked the following:

"In our company we already have developed a great library that can be used to summarize text articles. Just feed it the whole text and it will return a decent summary that is just a few sentences long.

We need to put this in production and make it scalable. We expect that our customers will submit text articles from our mobile app and also from our website.

The library currently takes between 0.1 and 5 seconds to summarize an article. You need to design a system that uses our existing library and allows users to submit text articles through the mobile app and through the website.

We anticipate that this service will be used around 1 million times a month. Our desire is to not respond in more than 10 seconds to each request."

Let’s see what system design we can build here…