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6115123, 837 AM Design BookMyShow — A System Design Interview Question | by Anu Upadhyay | Medium
Design BookMyShow — A System Design
Interview Question
‘Anu Upadhyay - Follow
@min read » Jan2
© tisten (Share
It’s really easy to search for your favorite movie in a theatre, check the seat availability,
and, book the ticket on the BookMyShow app within just 5-10 minutes without much
effort...
We all know the services of BookMyShow (after all we all love to watch the movies...
lolz) and how it works, but can you imagine how behind this gigantic website how
engineers have used their brains to build the complex architecture of this system?
What if we ask you to design this system within just 45 minutes (or less) of a short time
(isit a joke..2?)...? We are not joking but if you're someone who is preparing yourself to
get into the top tech giant companies, you may face the system design round in
interviews (especially for the role of senior engineer), and designing a system like
BookMyShow is quite a common question of this round. In this blog, we will discuss
how to design an online ticket booking system like BookMyShow.
1. Define Goals and Requirements
Tell your interviewer that you're going to support the below features. If the interviewer
wants to add some more features he/she will mention that.
* The portal should list the different cities where the theatres are located. (RDBMS)
* Once the user selects the city it should display the movies released in that
particular city to that user.
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© Once the nser selects the movie the nortal shonld disnlaw the cinemas running
that mov
* Users sh e tickets
(third-party payment support).
* Send a copy of tickets via SMS notification or Email. (workers and GCM)
* Movies suggestions when login (Hadoop and spark streaming with ML to get
recommendation engine), real-time notifications to the user about new movie
releases & other stuff.
© The portal should display the seating arrangement of the cinema hall to the user.
Users should be able to select multiple seats according to their choice.
* Users should be able to hold the seats for 5-10 minutes before he/she finalized the
payment.
* The portal should serve the tickets in a First In First Out manner
* Comments and rating (Cassandra)
* The system should be highly concurrent because there will be multiple booking
requests for the same seat at the same time.
‘tions.
* The core thing of the portal is ticket bookings which means financial transa
So the system should be secure and ACID compliant.
+ Responsive design (ReactJ$ and Bootstrap) to run on devices of various sizes like
mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.
* Movie information.
2. How does Bookmyshow Talk to Theatres?
When you visit any third-party application/movie tickets aggregator using the mobile
app or website, you see the available and occupied seats for a movie show in that
theatre. Now the question is how these third-party aggregators talk to the theatres, get
the available seat information, and display it to the users. Definitely, the app needs to
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work with the theatre's server to gat the seat allncation and sive it ta the ners, There
are mainly t
* Aspecif on these
seats will be offered to the users. In this strategy, some seats are already reserved
for these aggregators, so there is no need to keep updating the seat information
from all the theatres.
* Inthe second strategy, the app can work along with the theatre and other
aggregators to keep updating the seat availability information. Then the ticket will
be offered to the users.
3. How to Get The Seat Availability Information?
‘There are mainly two ways to get this information...
* The aggregators can connect to the theatre's DB directly and get the information
from the database table. Then this information can be cached and displayed to the
user.
* Use the theatre’s server API to get the available seat information and book the
tickets.
What will happen if multiple users will try to book the same ticket using different
platforms? How to solve this problem?
The theatre's server needs to follow a timeout locking mechanism strategy where a seat
will be locked temporarily for a user for a specific time session (for example, 5-10
minutes). If the user is not able to book the seat within that timeframe then release the
seat for another user. This should be done on a first come first serve basis.
If you're using the theatre's server API then you will be making a lot of requests or 10-
blocking calls from your server to the theatre's server. To achieve the better
performance we should use async in python or Erlangs lightweight threads or Go
Coroutines in Go!
High-Level Architecture
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Design BookMyShow — A System Design Interview Question | by Anu Upadhyay | Medium
nin with your member acec
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BookMyShow is built on microservice architecture. Let's look at the components
individually.
Load Balancer
A load balancer is used to distribute the load on the server and to keep the system
highly concurrent when we are scaling the app server horizontally. The load balancer
can use multiple techniques to balance the load and these are...
1. Consistent Hashing
2. Round Robin
3. Weighted Round Robin
4, Least Connection
Frontend Caching and CDN
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a86/15/23, 837 AM Design BookMyShow — A System Design Interview Question | by Anu Upadhyay | Medium
We do frontend caching using Varnish to reduce the Inad fram the hackend,
infrastructu co, images,
and other cc
App Servers
There will be multiple app servers and BookMyShow uses Java, Spring Boot, Swagger,
and Hibernate for the app servers. We can also go with Python-based or Node]
servers (Depending on requirements). We also need to scale these app servers
horizontally to take the heavy load and to handle a lot of requests in parallel.
Elastic Search
Elastic search is used to support the search APIs on Bookmyshow (to search movies or
shows). Elastic search is distributed and it has RESTful search APIs available in the
system. It can be also used as an analytics engine that works as an App-level search
engine to answer all the search queries from the front end.
Caching
To save the information related to the movies, seat ordering, theatres, etc, we need to
use caching. We can use Memcache or Redis for caching to save all this information in
Bookmyshow. Redis is open-source and it can be also used for the locking mechanism
to block the tickets temporarily for a user. It means when a user is trying to book the
ticket Redis will block the tickets with a specific TTL.
Database
‘We need to use both RDBMS and NoSQL databases for different purposes. Let's analyze
what we need in our system and which database is suitable for what kind of data...
* RDBMS: We have mentioned that we need ACID property in our system. Also, we
have countries, cities, theatres in cities, multiple screens in these theatres, and
multiple rows of seats on each screen. So here it is clear that we need a proper
relationship representation. Also, we need to handle the transaction. RDBMS is fit
for these cases. The portal will be read-heavy so we need to shard the data by Geo
or we need to use master-master slave architecture. Slaves can be used for reading
and master for writing.
+ NoSQL: We also have a huge amount of data like movie information, actors, crew,
comments, and reviews. RDBMS can not handle this much amount of data so we
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need to nse the NaSOI. datahase which can he distribnted Cascandra can be a good
choice t« Fdata in
multiple lability and
durabilit, . her nodes).
* Use HDFS to run queries for analytics.
Async Workers
‘The main task of the Async worker is to execute the tasks such as generating the pdf or
png of the images for booked tickets and sending the notification to the users. For push
notifications, SMS notifications, or emails we need to call third-party APIs. These are
network IO and it adds a lot of latency. Also, these time-consuming tasks can not be
executed synchronously. To solve this problem, as soon as the app server confirms the
booking of the tickets, it will send the message to the message queue, a free worker
will pick up the task, execute it asynchronously and provide the SMS notification,
other notifications, or email to the users. RabbitMQ or Kafka can be used for Message
Queueing Systems and Python celery can be used for workers. For browser
notifications or phone Notifications use GCM/ APN.
Business Intelligence and ML
For data analysis of business information, we need to have a Hadoop platform. All the
logs, user activity, and information can be dumped into Hadoop, and on top of it, we
can run PIG/Hive queries to extract information like user behavior or user graph. ML
is used to understand the user’s behavior and to generate movie recommendations etc.
For real-time analysis, we can use Spark streaming. We can also figure out fraud
detection and mitigation strategy using the Spark or Storm stream processing engine.
Log Management
ELK (ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack is used for the logging system. All the logs
are pushed into the Logstash. Logstash collects data from all the servers via
Files/Syslog/socket/AMQP etc and based on a different set of filters it redirects the logs
to Queue/File/Hipchat/Whatsapp/JIRA etc.
Step By Step Working
« The customer visits the portal and filters the location. To find the location we can
use GPS (if it’s a mobile phone) or ISP (if it’s a laptop). Then the theatres and movies
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released in that theatres will he snecested to the ncer Data will he nrovided from
DB and1
* Users se all the
nearby theatres.
* Users select a particular date and time for a movie in his/her own choice of theatre.
The available seat information will be fetched from the database and it will be
displayed to the user.
* Once the user selects the available seat, BMS locks the seat temporarily for the next
10 minutes. BMS interacts with the theatre DB and blocks the seat for the user. The
ticket will be booked temporarily for the current user and for all the other users
using different aggregators or apps the seat will be unavailable for the next 10
minutes. If the user is failed to book the ticket within that timeframe the seat will
be released for the other aggregators.
« Ifthe user continues with the booking he/she will check the invoice with the
payment option and after the payment via the payment gateway, the app server
will be notified about the successful payment.
« After successful payment, a unique ID will be generated by the theatre and it will
be provided to the app server.
* Using that unique ID a ticket will be generated with a QR code and a copy of the
ticket will be shown to the user. Also, a message to the queue will be added to send
the invoice copy of the ticket to the user via SMS notification or email. The ticket
will have all the details such as the movie, address of the theatre, timing, theatre
number, ete.
* At movie time, when the customer visits the theatre the QR code will be scanned
and the customer will be allowed to enter the theatre if the ID will be matched on
both customer's ticket and the theatre's ticket.
APIs Needed
© GetListOfCities()
+ GetListOfiventsByCity(Cityld)
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© GetLocationsRwCitw/Citeta)
* GetLoca
* GetEven..
* GetShowTiming(eventid, locationid)
* GetAvailableSeats(eventid, locationid, showtimeid)
* VarifyUserSelectedSeatsAvailable(eventid, locationid, showtimeid, seats)
« BlockUserSelectedSeats()
* BookUserSelectedSeat()
GetTimeoutForUserSelectedSeats()
RDBMS Tables
* Place (To save the hierarchal data for any given theatre-like country, state, city, and
street)
© Theatre
* Screen
* Tier (tier of seats)
* Seats
* Movie
* Offers
* Ticket
User
Relationship Between RDBMS Tables:
* One to many: Place and theatre.
* One to many: Theatre and screen
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© One to many: Screen and Tier
One ton
One to o..
One to many: User and Tickets
One to many: Tickets and Seats
NoSQL Tables
There will be no relationship between these tables.
Comments
* Ratings
* Movie Information
« Trailers or Gallery
© Artists
* Cast and Crew
+ Reviews
Analytics Data
Technologies Used By Bookmyshow
© User Interface: ReactJS & BootStrapJS
Server language and Framework: Java, Spring Boot, Swagger, Hibernate
Securit
Spring Security
Database: MySQL
Server:
tomcat
Caching: In memory cache Hazelcast.
* Notifications: RabbitMQ. A Distributed message queue for push notifications.
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one6115123, 837 AM Design BookMyShow — A System Design Interview Question | by Anu Upadhyay | Medium
¢ Payment APT: Ponnlar anes are Pavnal Strine Samare
Deployn
Code rep.
Logging: Log4J
Log Management: ELK Stack
Load balancer: Nginx
Alot of candidates get afraid of the system design round more than the coding round.
The reason is... they don’t get an idea that what topics and tradeoffs they should cover
within this limited timeframe. They need to keep in mind that the system design round
is extremely open-ended and there's no such thing as a standard answer. For the same
questions, the conversation with the different interviewers can be different. Your
practical experience, your knowledge, your understanding of the modern software
system, and how you express yourself clearly during your interview matter a lot to
designing a system successfully.
System Design Interview Software Development Programming Computer Science
System Architecture
CIO
Written by Anu Upadhyay
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Engineer at Infoaain India. Ex-GeeksForGeeks. httos://wwwlinkedin.com/in/anu-upadhvav/
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