Build a distributed File Storage Pipeline
Last updated: July 31, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Workday
System Design
Software Engineer
Workday
July 31, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Hard
39
8
1,533 solved
Design a distributed file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Workday 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
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Database selection and data modeling
Message queues and async processing
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users can upload and download files of various types (e.g., documents, images, videos).
- File Metadata Management: The system should stor...
Capacity Estimation
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume 1 million active users.
- File Operations: Estimate each user performs 10 file operations per day (upload/download/search).
- Total Operations: ...
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