Architect a fault-tolerant Video Streaming Engine
Last updated: September 23, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
September 23, 202569
13
1,455 solved
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Optiver. 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. Optiver 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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Users must log in to access the video streaming service.
- Video Upload: Users can upload videos to the platform.
- Video Playback: Us...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Optiver aims to serve 10 million users with an average of 2 video requests per user per day:
- Total Video Requests per Day: 10 million users * 2 requests = 20 million requests.
- **Pea...
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