Architect a fault-tolerant Image Processing Engine
Last updated: April 17, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Splunk
April 17, 20260
14
1,563 solved
Design a fault-tolerant image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Splunk 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
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
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 handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Image Upload: Users must be able to upload images in various formats (JPEG, PNG, etc.).
- Image Processing: The system must apply multiple processing...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity:
- Requests per Second (RPS):
- Targeting 10 million requests per day.
- 10 million / 86400 seconds = ~115.74 requests/second.
- Storage Requirements:
- Av...
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