QA
Senior LevelSystem Design & Architecture

How do you scale a Global Distributed Rate Limiter to handle 10 Million RPS?

❓ Interview Prompt: Explain scaling Rate Limiters to 10 Million RPS, Local Memory Batching, Redis Sync, Async Token Refills, and Edge WAF enforcement.

Scaling a Rate Limiter to handle 10 Million Requests Per Second without bottlenecking on central Redis clusters:

Multi-Tier Architecture:

1
Edge Enforcement: Execute coarse rate limits at CDN / WAF Edge PoPs.
2
Local Memory Batching: Gateway instances reserve a batch of 100 tokens locally in memory, syncing remaining counts asynchronously with Redis every 1 second, reducing Redis throughput load by $99\%$!

Code Implementation Example

markdown
10 Million RPS Distributed Rate Limiter Architecture:

[Client Traffic (10M RPS)] ──> [Edge WAF (Cloudflare)]
                                      β”‚
                                      β–Ό
                        [API Gateway Local Token Batch]
                                      β”‚ (Async Sync 1s)
                                      β–Ό
                           [Central Redis Cluster]
πŸ’‘High-throughput distributed rate limiting architecture using local memory batching.
🎯 Interview Key Takeaway

Scale distributed rate limiters to millions of RPS using edge enforcement and local memory batching to reduce Redis cluster throughput load.

#System Design#Rate Limiter#Scalability#Redis#Senior
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