System Design: High-Volume Event Ingestion

Design a pipeline that ingests billions of analytics events per day from mobile clients and makes them queryable.

Technical Reference & Key Concepts

The Challenge: Analytics Event Pipeline

Mobile and web clients emit analytics events (page views, clicks, errors). You must ingest billions per day, lose none, and let analysts query them with reasonable latency.

Core questions to address:

  1. How do clients get events into the system reliably, and where do events land first?
  2. How do you batch/stream them into a queryable store without losing data?
  3. How do you bound cost and handle backpressure when downstream consumers are slow?