Architect a geo-distributed Content Delivery Engine
Last updated: July 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Roblox
July 9, 202546
11
4,693 solved
Design a geo-distributed content delivery 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 Roblox. 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. Roblox values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Serve static and dynamic content to users globally with low latency.
- Support millions of concurrent requests with scalability.
- Provide content versi...
Capacity Estimation
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Traffic Estimation:
Assuming Roblox has 200 million active users, and each user makes an average of 50 requests per day.- Total daily requests = 200M users * 50 requests = 10 billion...
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