Production URL Shortener – MLH PE Hackfest 2026
Production-grade URL shortener built for the MLH Production Engineering Hackathon, demonstrating SRE practices: horizontal scaling, Redis caching, observability, load testing, and incident runbooks.
Context
Built during the MLH PE Hackfest 2026 to demonstrate real-world production engineering skills including reliability, scalability, and observability on a constrained single-node deployment.
Challenge
Designing a system that handles high concurrency on a 512MB/1vCPU droplet while maintaining low latency, full observability, and graceful failure handling across all components.
Solution
Deployed 2 Flask instances behind Nginx for horizontal scaling, implemented Redis caching on redirect lookups and list endpoints with cache invalidation, instrumented with Prometheus metrics, visualised in Grafana, and load tested with k6 at 200 concurrent users.
Technology Stack
backend
infrastructure
observability
testing
Impact & Results
Redis caching reduced error rate from 1.68% to 1.28% (24% improvement) under 200 concurrent users
Health endpoint reports DB and cache status independently, enabling precise incident diagnosis
Failure mode documentation covering 6 failure scenarios with expected responses and recovery steps
CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions) running tests on every push and PR
Runbook and deploy guide enabling repeatable zero-downtime deployments
Technologies
Links
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