Architect a real-time Video Streaming Engine
Last updated: November 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Lyft
System Design
Software Engineer
Lyft
November 27, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
4
13
2,973 solved
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Lyft asks this during the System Design Round to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
High-level architecture and component design
Security and authentication
Database selection and data modeling
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
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 would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Support real-time video streaming for drivers and riders during rides.
- Provide features for video recording, playback, and sharing.
- Enable live mode...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base and Requests:
- Assume 10 million active Lyft users.
- Estimate 10% (1 million users) using video streaming at peak times.
- Each user generates 1 request per second.
...
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