Design of Google Docs

Let's understand how we can design the collaborative document editing service using various components.

Design

We’ll complete our design in two steps. In the first step, we’ll explain different components and building blocks and the reason for their choice in our design. The second step will describe how we fulfill various functional requirements by depicting a workflow.

Components

We’ve utilized the following set of components to complete our design:

  • API gateway: Different client requests will get intercepted through the API gateway. Depending on the request, it’s possible to forward a single request to multiple components, reject a request, or reply instantly using an already cached response, all through the API gateway. Edit requests, comments on a document, notifications, authentication, and data storing requests will all go through the API gateway.
  • Application servers: The application servers will run business logic and tasks that generally require computational power. For instance, some documents may be converted from one file type to another (for example, from a PDF to a Word document) or support features like
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