Architect a geo-distributed File Storage Engine
Last updated: July 12, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
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Design a geo-distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at Pinterest goes beyond model selection. This System Design Round question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
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 ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
- What is your model retraining strategy?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Store and retrieve user-generated media files (images, videos) across multiple geographic regions.
- Support versioning for files, allowing rollback and access to ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Pinterest has approximately 500 million active users, and each user uploads an average of 2 files per month:
- Total File Uploads per Month: 500 million users * 2 files = 1 billion files....
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