System design interview question
Design a Rate Limiter for API Gateway (like Stripe API rate limiting)
Design a distributed rate limiting system for an API gateway that serves 1 million users making requests to backend services. The system must enforce per-user rate limits (e.g., 100 requests per minute) and return 429 status codes when limits are exceeded. Requests come from geographically distributed clients and are processed across multiple API gateway instances. The solution should handle bursts gracefully, maintain accurate counts with minimal latency overhead, and support dynamic limit configuration without downtime.
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