Design Uber

Overview–

Uber is a ride-sharing platform that connects passengers with drivers who offer transportation services in personal vehicles. It allows users to book rides on demand from their smartphones, matching them with a nearby driver who will take them from their location to their desired destination.

Functional Requirements–
Users should be able to input a start location and a destination and get an estimated fare.
Users should be able to request a ride based on an estimate.
Drivers should be accept/deny a request and navigate to pickup/drop-off

Out of scope—
Multiple car types
Rating for drivers and riders
Schedule a ride in advance

Non-Functional Requirements–
Low latency matching < 1 min match or failure
Consistency of math. Ride to driver is 1:1
Highly available outside the matching.
Handle high throughput and surges for peak hours or special events. 100s of thousands of requests within a given region.

Out of scope—
Resilience and handling system failures
Monitoring logging, alerting, etc.
CI/CD pipeline

Core Entities—
Ride
Driver
Rider
Location

API–
POST /ride/fare-estimate -> Partial<Ride>
{
Source,
destination
}
PATCH /ride/request -> 200
{
rideId
}

POST /location/update
{
lat,
long
}
PATCH /ride/driver/accept
{
rideId,
true/false
}
PATCH /ride/driver/update -> lat/long | null
{
rideId,
status: “pickup | droppedoff”
}

High Level Design --