Architect a distributed Video Streaming Engine
Last updated: October 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Plaid
October 14, 2025115
7
4,566 solved
Design a distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Plaid typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Users must log in to access video content.
- Video Upload: Users can upload videos in various formats.
- Video Streaming: The system m...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Plaid aims to support:
- 5 million active users per day,
- Each user streams an average of 3 videos per day,
- Each video has an average size of 300 MB (in HD).
Calculations:...
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