Architect a distributed File Storage Engine
Last updated: August 18, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Mastercard
August 18, 2025234
5
4,253 solved
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Mastercard. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Mastercard values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload and Download: Users must be able to upload and download files securely.
- File Metadata Management: Store and retrieve metadata (e.g., file size, ty...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Mastercard handles approximately 10 million file upload/download requests daily:
- Peak Load Estimation: Assume peak usage at 5x average, leading to 2.1 million requests per hour (around...
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