Design a Social Graph

Hard

System design · Graph Data · LinkedIn

Design the social graph backend for a social network. Users can follow or friend each other, query relationships, and receive friend recommendations.

Requirements

Support high-degree users with millions of followers
Answer relationship, follower, following, and mutual-connection queries
Handle blocks, privacy, recommendations, and graph updates
Discuss adjacency storage, sharding, cache, graph databases, and denormalization

Workspace