Property Rental Search System

Redesign a property-rental website for global customers on cloud infrastructure. The prompt names payment, view, guest, search, and update services, with emphasis on fast, secure search and property browsing. Requirements Functional requirements: Display property details including photos, location, and rent details. Let international guests search across properties quickly and securely. Support online payments. Maintain guest state such as favorites and recently checked records. Support property updates from the owner / dealer workflow. Scale / constraints: Global users need low-latency reads. Photos and property metadata have different storage and caching needs. Search should remain responsive as listings grow. Design decisions to discuss: split of payment, view, guest, search, and update services search index freshness vs write complexity CDN / object storage for photos authentication and secure payment handoff observability for failed searches, payment failures, and stale listings Notes Interviewer interest can center on search. Prepare filtering by location, rent, availability, and favorites, plus indexing and cache invalidation after listing updates. Treat payments as a separate service boundary with idempotent payment attempts and clear failure states. Do not leave a generic box named "process" in the workflow; replace it with concrete read, search, guest-state, update, and payment flows. Preparation Sketch a component diagram with CDN/object storage, property metadata store, search index, guest profile store, payment service, and update pipeline. Prepare one answer for global read latency: regional edge cache for photos and metadata, backed by a central source of truth and async search-index updates. Practice the failure paths: payment timeout, listing updated while a guest is viewing, unavailable property in search results, and stale favorites.