Akamai

2 design problems known to be asked at Akamai.

Medium2

Mediumhigh level design distributed systems data structures

Bloom Filters: The Yes/No That Saves a Disk Seek

A tiny bit-array that answers 'definitely not here' or 'maybe here' in constant time — how Cassandra, HBase, and Chrome skip millions of expensive lookups for keys that were never there.

Asked at Google, Amazon, Meta +3

Aug 8, 2026·12 min read

Mediumhigh level design distributed systems networking

CDNs: Move the Bytes to the User, Not the User to the Bytes

A user in Sydney pays ~200ms to reach a Virginia origin before any work happens — physics you can't code around. This is how CDNs cheat the speed of light with edge PoPs, anycast routing, and HTTP caching.

Asked at Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly +3

Aug 8, 2026·16 min read