Architect a high-throughput File Storage Engine
Last updated: February 28, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase
February 28, 20263
13
3,596 solved
Design a high-throughput file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Supabase 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 monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users must be able to upload and download files of varying sizes (up to 10GB).
- Versioning: Users should be able to access previous versi...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, we assume the following:
- User Base: 1 million users
- Average File Size: 5MB
- Requests per User per Day: 20 requests (upload/download)
Calculated Values
- **...
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