System design interview guide
Design Amazon: System Design Interview Guide
in this guide
Design Amazon, part by part
7 parts open to everyone · 3 with a free account · 3 with the course
You can read 7 of 13 parts. A free account opens the deep dive; the course opens all of it.
- Requirementsopen
- Scale estimatesopen
Why this question is asked
Design Amazon spans more subsystems than any other interview problem. Interviewers use it to test whether you can decompose a giant problem into independent services, pick the right database per service, and handle a transactional pipeline (order to fulfillment) without losing inventory or charging twice.
This page is the free part.
The course goes deeper on the Amazon design
₹1,111 in India$25 everywhere elseonce, for the whole course
The System Design course covers the Amazon design across a run of lessons, not one page. These 4 alone are about 108 minutes of step-by-step reading, 1 of them with code you run in the browser, all with a quiz.
Requirements
Always clarify these in the first 5 minutes of the interview. Do not start drawing boxes until both lists are agreed.
Functional requirements
- Browse and search a catalog of 350M+ products
- Add to cart, update quantities, remove items
- Checkout with multiple payment methods and addresses
- Real-time inventory check before order confirmation
Go deeper
This guide is built on these 5 lessons. Each one teaches one piece of the Amazon design above, step by step.
Practice with 770 system design lessons
Lifetime access for ₹1,111 in India or $25 elsewhere. Interactive diagrams, quizzes, and 20 capstone projects to practise on.
This one question is not enough for the interview.
Get all 200 questions in the System Design and Distributed Systems pack
Each question has why it is asked, a full answer, what the interviewer listens for, the follow-ups, the common mistakes and a diagram (268 diagrams in all). A PDF you keep, junior to staff level.
