Technology

Design a rate limiter for a public API

A public API serves 50k requests/second across millions of clients. Design a rate limiter that protects backends from abuse while staying fair to legitimate high-volume users. Compare token bucket, sliding window, and leaky bucket, and justify what you'd ship.

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The brief

Solve it in plain text with any AI you like, in about 10 to 20 minutes. A judge scores how you reasoned, not whether you matched an answer.

Constraints

Must work across a horizontally scaled fleet (no single source of truth in-process)
p99 added latency under 5ms
Limits configurable per API key and per route
Graceful degradation if the rate-limit store is unavailable

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