Design a Scalable View / Like Counter

Design the counting service behind a large content platform (think a popular short-video feed) that tracks how many times each item was viewed and how many likes it holds, then shows those totals back to viewers. Every playback and every tap of the heart is an increment; every render of a card wants the current numbers. The interesting part is that writes vastly outnumber reads on the hot path, and the traffic is brutally skewed toward a handful of trending items.

Operating context. The catalog holds ~2 billion items. Aggregate increments run at ~500,000/sec on a normal day and burst past 2,000,000/sec when something goes viral, while read requests for the displayed totals run ~150,000/sec. On any given hour, the top ~1,000 items absorb a large share of all increments — a single trending clip can take 50,000 increments/sec by itself. A view is a fire-and-forget signal that may be reasonably approximate; a like is a per-user toggle where a given user's like must count at most once and the user must see their own toggle reflect immediately. Displayed totals may lag reality by a few seconds for non-actors.

Out of scope. The recommendation/feed ranking, video storage and transcoding, spam/bot detection beyond a mention of where it hooks in, the client UI, and cross-item analytics dashboards (assume a separate warehouse pipeline consumes the same event stream).

What to produce. A high-level architecture covering: the increment (write) path and the read path with their API shapes; how you shard or aggregate a per-item counter so no single row becomes a bottleneck; where you sit on the approximate-vs-exact spectrum for views versus likes and why; how you special-case hot items; how a like stays idempotent per (user, item) so a double-tap or a client retry doesn't inflate the count; and how reads are cached and refreshed so the display path stays cheap. Sketch the major components and the flow between them; checkpoints will probe the hot-item write path and the like-idempotency scheme specifically.