Arpit's Newsletter read by 38000+ engineers
Weekly essays on real-world system design, distributed systems, or a deep dive into some super-clever algorithm.
The emergency button on the Uber app is life-saving; and the service powering it needs to be available 24 x 7, no matter what!
So, how did Uber design such a service? How did they make it highly available; hereβs a quick gist about its system design πβ
When the emergency button is pressed, we first need to gather all the critical information and send it to the server. The critical information could be
When the emergency button is pressed, we do not just need to fetch the location at that moment, instead we continuously capture the location and keep sending it to the backend.
This would help us notify the nearby police and help them keep an eye on the movement.
To make tracing effective, we cannot just share the lat and long because they are incomprehensible; hence we try to deduce the address from the lat-long.
This process of deducing address from lat-long is called Reverse Geocoding.
Uber uses a 3rd party service named RapidSOS to notify nearby local authorities.
RapidSOS provides APIs to register an emergency and send live updates about the emergency. It takes care of notifying the local authorities and providing them with the necessary information.
Uber not only notifies the police through RapidSOS, but it also notifies
The notification to all channels happens in parallel to increase the probability of someone getting notified.
Given that the emergency service deals with events that are urgent, important, and critical; it is extremely crucial that the service is reliable and highly available; which means
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Arpit's Newsletter read by 38000+ engineers
Weekly essays on real-world system design, distributed systems, or a deep dive into some super-clever algorithm.